Money, Markets and Trade in Late Medieval Europe
Later Medieval Europe Managing Editor
Douglas Biggs Waldorf College
Editorial Board Members
Kelly DeVries Loyola College
William Chester Jordan Princeton Iniversity
Cynthia J. Neville Dalhousie University
Kathryn L. Reyerson University of Minnesota
VOLUME 1
Money, Markets and Trade in Late Medieval Europe Essays in Honour of John H.A. Munro
Edited by
Lawrin Armstrong Ivana Elbl Martin M. Elbl
LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007
On the cover: Seal of the port of Portsmouth, 13th c. (Actual wax seal impression: private collection (M.M. Elbl). © Photograph: M.M. Elbl.) Brill has done its best to establish rights to use of the materials printed herein. Should any other party feel that its rights have been infringed we would be glad to take up contact with them. This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISSN 1872–7875 ISBN-13: 978-90-04-15633-3 ISBN-10: 90-04-15633-X Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands
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LIST OF FIGURES
Changing Composition of the Exchequer Assignment (Household) ............................................................................ 219 Changing Composition of Assignments for Moradias of the Portuguese Royal Household ..................................... 230 Flanders and Adjacent Regions (Map)
................................. 317
Regional Groupings in Flanders and Its Environs (Map) ....................................................................................... 318 Places with Regulated Textile Industries by 1382, Castellany of Ypres and Environs ......................................... 323 Von Thünen Rings with an Interaction Model
.................... 366
A Von Thünen System with Multiple Market Centres
......... 367
Price of Gold (1360=100): Mediterranean “Levantine” Ports .................................................................... 384 Price of Gold (1360=100): Northern Europe
...................... 385
Price of Gold (1360=100): The Western Mediterranean ........................................................................ 386 African Gold Trade, 1310-1370 (Map)
................................. 388
African Gold Trade, 1445-1454 (Map)
................................. 390
Price of Gold (1360=100): The Maghrib
............................ 395
Price of Gold and Silver (1360=100): Egypt Bi-Metallic Ratios
....................... 397
................................................................... 398
West-Central Sahara and the Maghrib (Map) The Tuat and Gurara (Map)
...................... 414
................................................. 422
Selected European Copper Mining Centers (Map) The Borromei Family (Selected Genealogy)
............. 443
......................... 462
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LIST OF TABLES
Revenue-Generating Approaches
...........................................
96
Gold and Money Receipts of the Guinea House, 1476-1505 ............................................................................... 116 Manresan Annual Tax Revenues, 1254-1418
....................... 125
Revenue from Some Specific Taxes in Manresa
.................. 127
Nominal and Real Royal Income from Manresa, 1254-1380 ............................................................................... 128 Known Extraordinary Payments Levied at Manresa, 1325-1378 ............................................................................... 130 Tolls on Some Common Trade Goods Occurring in Local Toll Lists .................................................................. 158 Tolls on Some Common Trade Goods Occurring in Lists of Public Works Tolls ............................................... 159 Revenues for Household Assignment (Exchequer)
.............. 218
Revenues Assigned to Pay the Moradias of the Portuguese Royal Household ................................................. 229 Ships in Naval Service, the Bordeaux Wine Trade, and Pilgrim Transport ........................................................... 246 Percentage Distribution of Complementary Input Supply Clauses in Sample, by Time Periods ........................ 282 Estimated Coefficients of Multinomial Logit Number of Debt Recognitions per Year
....................... 288
............................... 335
Regional Groups
..................................................................... 336
Cases by Region
..................................................................... 337
Fairs as Percentage of Regions’ Total Cases
......................... 338
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CONTRIBUTORS
JOHN DRENDEL received a doctorate in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto in 1991 and now teaches at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His published work on medieval Provence includes studies of Jews, credit, women and family. He is currently editing a collection of articles for Brill devoted to the influence of Michael Postan upon French historiography. IVANA ELBL (Ph.D., University of Toronto, 1986) is Associate Professor of History, Trent University, and Chief Editor of the Portuguese Studies Review. Her research focuses on the societal dynamics of late medieval Portugal and on the early Portuguese overseas expansion. MARTIN ELBL (M.A., University of Toronto, 1981) is an adjunct member of the Department of History, Trent University, Managing Editor of the Portuguese Studies Review, and a professional computer graphics artist and cartographer. His research and publications focus on late medieval Italian and Iberian relations with North Africa, as well as on Jewish history, the Balearic Islands, and colonial military presence in the Maghrib. He currently works on a study of decision-making in the Datini Compagnia di Catalogna. SUSANNAH HUMBLE FERREIRA received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and now teaches Medieval History at the University of Guelph in Canada. She specializes in the political culture in late medieval Europe and is currently working on a study comparing the development of the royal court in England and Portugal. JEFFREY FYNN-PAUL received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2005. His dissertation was entitled “The Catalan City of Manresa in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: A Political, Social, and Economic History.” His research focuses on structural aspects of Western Mediterranean society during the decades following the post-Black Death crisis. FRANCESCO L. GALASSI was a student of John Munro both in undergraduate and graduate courses. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and subsequently taught in Spain (Universidad Carlos III) and England (University of Leicester and Warwick University) before returning to his native Italy. He is currently an Associate Fellow of Warwick University, a lecturer in Economic History at the University of Ferrara, and the Technical Director of InMetrica srl, a consultancy.
CONTRIBUTORS
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FRANCESCO GUIDI BRUSCOLI, a ricercatore in Economic History at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Florence and Senior Research Fellow of the Department of History at Queen Mary, University of London, is a specialist in European banking history of the late medieval and early modern periods. MARTHA HOWELL is the Miriam Champion Professor of History at Columbia University, New York. She specializes in the social and economic history of the Burgundian Netherlands, with particular interest in gender, urban society, and commerce. Her publications include Women Production and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities; The Marriage Exchange; and (with Walter Prevenier) From Reliable Sources (in German as Werkstatt des Historikers). She is completing a book called Commerce Before Capitalism. LUTZ KAELBER received his Ph.D. from Indiana University and is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont. His research interests include Weberian studies, social theory, comparative historical sociology, and the boundaries between pilgrimage and tourism. He is the author of Schools of Asceticism: Ideology and Organization in Medieval Religious Communities (1998), which received the 1999 Best Book award of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion section, and the translator of Max Weber’s dissertation, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages (2003). His most recent book, as co-editor, is The Protestant Ethic Turns 100 (2005). MARYANNE KOWALESKI is Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J., Distinguished Professor of Social Science and History at Fordham University, where she also serves as Director of the Center for Medieval Studies. Her publications include books and articles on maritime history, towns and trade, and women and family. CHARLOTTE MASEMANN teaches history at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is a recent graduate of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, where John Munro was her Ph.D. thesis supervisor. Her academic areas of interest are agrarian and environmental history, urban-rural relations, and material culture. JAMES MASSCHAELE is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he has also served two terms as Director of Medieval Studies. He is the author of Peasants, Merchants, and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England (1997) and his recent articles have appeared in Speculum (2002), Past & Present (2006), and The Black-
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CONTRIBUTORS
well Companion to the Middle Ages (forthcoming, 2007). He is currently writing a book on the medieval jury system. DAVID NICHOLAS is Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Professor Emeritus of History at Clemson University. He is the author or editor of fifteen books and numerous major articles on medieval Flanders and comparative pre-modern urbanisation. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is currently writing a study of elements of regional cohesion in Germanic Europe in the late Middle Ages. RICHARD W. UNGER succeeded John Munro teaching medieval economic history at the University of British Columbia where he is a professor, specializing in the history of shipping, shipbuilding and energy use from late antiquity through the eighteenth century. His most recent works deal with the history of brewing in medieval Europe and with Renaissance cartography. HERMAN VAN DER WEE is Professor Emeritus and former holder of the Chair of Social and Economic History at the University of Leuven (Belgium). He is a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium and a foreign member of the Academies of the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States. His main research is focused on socio-economic and financial history of Europe, in particular of the Low Countries, from the Middle Ages to the present, and on the history of the world economy during the twentieth century.
PREFACE Herman Van der Wee
Three—a magical number and, in this case, the number of unique reasons to accept with both hands the invitation to write a preface to the liber amicorum that is being offered to John H. A. Munro to mark his retirement. In the first place, this preface provides a formal framework within which to record, in an informal fashion, the joys of many years of friendship. Secondly, it serves as a vehicle to express the admiration for and appreciation of John Munro’s impressive academic oeuvre. Lastly, it affords me the pleasure of introducing the reader to the various chapters constituting the book, whether they address themselves to Munro’s own academic field of work or to his broader academic interests. It is surprising to note how wide that field of work actually is and how many historians of different specializations it has brought together. For all these reasons, it is a privilege for me, a fellow-traveller of long standing, to introduce this book. My friendship with John Munro dates back to the beginning of the 1970s. At that time, he was preparing for publication his doctoral thesis Wool, Cloth and Gold: Bullionism in Anglo-Burgundian Commercial Relations, 1348-1478, very successfully defended in 1964 at Yale University. A sabbatical leave fellowship during the 1970-1971 academic year allowed John to resume his research in Belgian archives and libraries, with the intention to add to the original data bank and to incorporate the analysis of the new data and its results into the upcoming volume. A visit to a colleague in the course of that year brought us into chance contact, and the acquaintance grew into a warm friendship, thanks chiefly to John’s regular trips to England, the Netherlands and Belgium during the summer holidays to indulge in a methodical plundering of our archives in order to satisfy his constant hunger for research. However strictly John held to the opening and closing times of archives—no minute could be lost—many evenings and weekends were kept free for cultural relaxation and get-togethers with friends. I can still see him, on his arrival in Brussels, making a detour to
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pick up concert programmes in the ‘Bozar’ (Palais des Beaux Arts), in order to lose himself in music during the solitary after-work hours; music, indeed, is no mean rival in his life to historical research. In fact, a weekend with John was never complete without a musical event. More than once, moreover, we have spent delightful summer hours at the seaside, the flow of absorbing academic discussion giving way to chin-wagging about what was close to our hearts—family, friends, the pleasure of being together and, of course, music. What for me has been the cement of such a long-lasting friendship is without doubt John’s generosity, a quality that I have come to value more and more over the years. He has always been prepared to share new ideas and theories, as well as his own hypotheses and discoveries, with anyone interested in them. He does so with great openness, without waiting for the success of any publication of his own. The same generosity is to be found in his interest in other people’s work. He is open to new approaches and, as a true academic, knows how to value a well-constructed piece of work, all the while reading and assessing everything with a sharp, critical eye. In a word, he has been and is an interested and lively travelling companion along the sometimes lonely paths of late medieval and early modern history. The second reason for my pleasure at being asked to write this preface involves my admiration for John Munro’s impressive academic career. The publication in 1973 of his PhD thesis under the new title of Wool, Cloth and Gold. The struggle for Bullion in AngloBurgundian Trade, 1340-1478 was a milestone in the historiography of Anglo-Dutch relations during the Late Middle Ages. Subsequent research prompted him to analyse this complex problem more deeply and, through contributions to various international journals, to make considerable improvements to his initial hypotheses. In this, his approach was two-pronged: it was aimed not only at refining the monetary and financial analysis but also at deepening the research on the history of textiles. The results were staggering and led the publisher Variorum to collect John’s most important article-length contributions in two publications: Bullion Flows and Monetary Policies in England and the Low Countries, 1350-1500 and Textiles, Towns and Trade. At the same time, John extended his field of work in space, in time and in theme. In the area of monetary history, he sought an
PREFACE
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explanation for the European depression of the Late Middle Ages: was its cause monetary, demographic, commercial or industrial? His conclusions produced important new insights into this episode in monetary history. In financial history, he focussed on the development of modern financial techniques in North-Western Europe, including the innovations of the early modern period. Closely connected with this area of research was the analysis of the development of economic thought, with particular emphasis on the problem of usury. The extension of the geographical horizon also involved commercial development, a constant in John Munro’s oeuvre. In consequence, the trade between the Netherlands and the Hanseatic towns, and between North-Western Europe and the Mediterranean region, by both land and sea, became more integrated into his research. John Munro’s work also continued to maintain its central focus on the industrial history of the Netherlands. Employing an international, comparative angle, he studied the development of the textile industry, including the attendant technological and technical advances in that sector. He also analysed the industrial and commercial policies of both the central and local governments, the impact of guilds and crafts, the history of prices and wages, and the development of purchasing power and the standard of living. His two crucial chapters in the recently published Cambridge History of Western Textiles—entitled respectively “Medieval Woollens: Textiles, Textile Technology and Industrial Organisation, c. 800-1500” and “Medieval Woollens: The Western European Woollen Industries and Their Struggles for International Markets, c. 1000-1500”—not only represent the pinnacle of years-long research but are as farreaching in their effect (other things being equal) for the history of textiles as the invention of the flying shuttle for the development of the textile industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In consequence of this impressive academic activity, John Munro has become one of his generation’s most outstanding scholars in respect to the history and economy of the Low Countries in medieval and early modern times. No topic of the social and economic history of those regions during those periods has escaped his eagle eye, and his contribution to our profession has been immense. When discussing with him the writing of an article, a chapter, a book, or the preparation of a colloquium or a conference paper, I have always been amazed by his massive erudition, his analytical
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power, his understanding of the underlying context and his mastery of economic theory. The combination of all these intellectual gifts enables him to fit all the pieces of a research puzzle together admirably. He has not only constructed a huge data bank on social and economic life in medieval and early modern times, but, as an outstanding historian and economist, has also created a fully viable framework for historical explanation. Furthermore, his writings have not only kept us wide awake, but have also prompted us—his colleagues and students alike—to get down to work as well. Thank you, John! Students and friends have indeed got down to work. On the occasion of his retirement, they organized in March 2004 at the University of Toronto a colloquium under the title “Money, Markets and Trade in Late Medieval Europe: An International Workshop in Honour of John Munro.” With their papers, the friends sought to demonstrate the extent of the inspiration they have drawn from John Munro’s academic oeuvre. For their part, the students looked to emphasize how fruitful his teaching and supervision have been in their university education and no less in their own research. As could be expected, the colloquium was a resounding success. The papers are now presented here in book form and, insofar as a book can, reflect the broad range of academic interest—“passion” would be a better word—apparent in John’s publications. The central theme running through the book is the business of trade, money, credit and finance during the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. In respect of trade, Mark Aloisio, Ian Blanchard, Jeffrey Fynn-Paul, Martin and Ivana Elbl, Francesco Guidi Bruscoli and J. L. Bolton present the results of their recent research on the Mediterranean region, Maryanne Kowaleski and James Masschaele those of their research in England, and Richard Unger (having slipped across the Channel) those of his research on commercial activities in the Netherlands. Studies on the development of finance and credit, and—closely linked to this—studies on the problem of usury in economic thought are among the contributions of Martha Howell, Lawrin Armstrong, David Nicholas, Lutz Kaelber, Susannah Humble Ferreira and Martha Carlin. The contributions on institutional history by John Drendel and Francesco L. Galassi are very much in line with John Munro’s own important research in this field. For their part, Kelly DeVries and
PREFACE
5
Maryanne Kowaleski (again) study certain aspects of the Hundred Years War, especially with reference to England; their contributions hark back to one of the earliest themes of John Munro’s research, Anglo-Dutch relations. Unlike him, both authors focus particularly on the problem of Anglo-French relations, although Anglo-Dutch relations were never far from centre-stage in that troubled period. At first sight, the contribution of Charlotte Masemann on horticulture in Lübeck appears to fall outside the scope of reference, but to say that would indicate only a superficial reading of her study. It is true that she takes horticulture as her subject, but the research has clearly been placed against the background of the interplay between purchasing power and consumption, a theme that has very much gripped John’s attention these last years and that has found expression in his most recent publications on prices and wages. The way in which this collection of academic contributions of the highest quality is presented is a clear reference to the remarkably wide field of research that John Munro has tilled during his academic career. For him, detailed, in-depth research and a tenacious attachment to primary source material are not goals in themselves, but a point of departure for setting out viable hypotheses, for the depiction of a living society, in which the place and function of each actor are marshalled in the correct perspective. This liber amicorum now offered to John is therefore a deserved tribute to an unrivalled master, teacher and faithful friend. 12 March 2004
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INTRODUCTION Lawrin Armstrong, Ivana Elbl, Martin M. Elbl
The essays in this volume have been compiled in honour of Professor John H. A. Munro on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Toronto in June 2003. During his thirty-five years in the Department of Economics and the Centre for Medieval Studies, John Munro had a profound impact on medieval and early-modern economic history not only through his extensive publications, his collaboration on several large-scale research projects and his participation in international colloquia and economic history associations, but also through his influence on several generations of doctoral candidates in Medieval Studies, Economics and History. The idea of a conference and Festschrift to honour John Munro was conceived separately by three of his formers students—Lawrin Armstrong, Maryanne Kowaleski and Ivana Elbl—who joined forces in 2002. They convened an international workshop under the title “Money, Markets and Trade in Late Medieval Europe” in Toronto on 12-14 March 2004, at which seventeen of Munro’s colleagues and former students presented papers. Thirteen of these appear in the present volume, along with six further papers solicited by the editors. The essays reflect the wide range of John Munro’s own research interests and those of his colleagues and students: international, regional and local trade, public finance, war economies, peasant studies and economic ethics. The conference organizers and editors sought to strike a geographical balance between the north—with an emphasis (in keeping with Munro’s own enduring focus) on the Low Countries, England and France—and the south: the Iberian peninsula, Provence and Italy, along with commercial ramifications in the Middle East, North and West Africa. Our aim was also to assemble a cross-section of junior, senior and mid-career historians, as well as a mix of scholars trained in Toronto and elsewhere. All the papers embody fresh research, in many cases (in the spirit of Munro’s own work) based on archival sources or understudied texts. John Munro is perhaps best known for his research on late medieval trade and finance, topics reflected in four of the seven
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thematic sections that follow. International commerce is the focus of three papers. Ian Blanchard considers the impact of changing trans-Saharan patterns of trade on Egyptian specie markets and ultimately on gold prices in western Europe, manifested most dramatically in the gold crisis of the early fifteenth century. Drawing on the rich resources of the Datini archive in Prato, Martin Elbl’s paper complements that of Blanchard with an exploration of the fourteenth-century trade in Venetian-supplied copper via the Balearics and the Sahara desert to the Western Sudan. The Datini material is set in the context of an analytical synopsis of recent research on late medieval European copper mining, which ranges from the historical literature to geological and mineralogical studies. Francesco Guidi Bruscoli and J. L. Bolton consider the role of Italian merchant banks in adjusting international trade balances in the mid-fifteenth century in a paper that outlines the initial results of their ambitious project to study and make accessible the records of the London and Bruges branches of the Borromei Bank in a digital format exploitable through software designed to manipulate ledgers and account books kept in the double-entry system. Mark Aloisio, David Nicholas and Richard Unger assess—or reassess—instances of market integration in high and late medieval Europe. Mark Aloisio’s examination of the Sicilian-Maltese grain trade in the fifteenth century challenges the assumption that royal policies necessarily facilitated regional market integration. David Nicholas invokes the economic geographers’ concept of “central place” to sharpen our understanding of the function of thirteenthcentury Ypres as a credit market integrated into wider economic flows in Flanders, northern France and at the Champagne fairs. Richard Unger reviews the economic factors at play in the southern Low Countries during the fifteenth century, arguing that the high degree of market integration observed by historians in the sixteenth century was by no means an inevitable outcome. Three papers highlight local and regional economies. Martha Carlin maps the complex retail market of thirteenth-century Paris, with excursions across the Channel to England, using didactic and dictaminal texts to showcase evidence related to trade. The paper includes, in appendix, new critical editions and translations of selected key texts. Martha Howell takes up and develops themes she has touched on in earlier studies in a paper on the shifting social functions and juridical definitions of property in the rapidly
INTRODUCTION
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changing economic environment of late medieval Ghent. Finally, drawing on a range of documentary and, more importantly, archaeological evidence, Charlotte Masemann creates a detailed profile of the market-garden economy of late medieval Lübeck. Ivana Elbl, Jeffrey Fynn-Paul and James Masschaele examine the relationship between public finance and broader economic and social trends. Ivana Elbl offers a wide-ranging reassessment of Portuguese royal policy in West Africa that stresses continuity with earlier, medieval models of revenue extraction and fiscal administration. Jeffrey Fynn-Paul’s close study of the relationship between demographic and fiscal crises in the late fourteenth-century Catalan city of Manresa proposes a model for interpreting similar phenomena in other European city-states dependent on funded public debt. James Masschaele focuses on surviving records of tolls and toll collection to develop a model for assessing the volume and nature of trade in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England. According to a medieval cliché, “money is the sinews of war,” and much of Munro’s research has focussed on the late medieval crisis, in which warfare played such a key role. Three essays take up this theme. Kelly DeVries examines the financing of the Hundred Years War and highlights the effects on military outcomes, a problem hitherto largely ignored by traditional military history. Building on her pioneering research on medieval Exeter, Maryanne Kowaleski offers a positive assessment of the war’s impact on the economies of English port towns. In an essay comparing the royal households of Henry VII of England and Manuel I of Portugal, Susannah Humble Ferreira argues that the tendency to enlarge the royal household underpinned the fiscal reforms of both kings. Peasant studies as such have not been a major focus of Munro’s work, but the two papers included here nevertheless reflect his methods and approach. John Drendel brings economic criteria to bear on the question of the apparent revival of servile labour in late medieval Provence. Francesco Galassi takes a quantitative look at adaptations in Italian share-cropping contracts over a period of seven centuries. The study develops a tentative, broadly applicable theory of contract-clause adoption, invoking a biological analogy approach to the emulation, mutation, and transmission of institutional norms. One of Munro’s earliest publications revisited the “Weber thesis” and has proved prophetic of the current revival of Weber studies
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exemplified by the work of Lutz Kaelber, who here argues for the centrality of the usury prohibition in Weber’s account of the medieval economy. Lawrin Armstrong’s paper takes up this theme by considering the vexed relationship between medieval canon law and moral theology expressed in two influential fourteenth-century treatises on usury by the jurist Giovanni d’Andrea and the ethicist Gerard of Siena. The editors and contributors offer the essays collected here as a fitting tribute to an inspiring teacher, friend and colleague, and a testimony to the continuing vitality of the field to which he has devoted his career. *** The editors and conference conveners wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Centre for Medieval Studies, the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, the Departments of Economics and History (University of Toronto), the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto), and the Department of History, Trent University (Peterborough), for their liberal sponsorship of the workshop that gave rise to this volume. We are particularly grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and to the Department of Economics, University of Toronto, who underwrote the costs of preparing the manuscript for publication. We also wish to acknowledge the generous assistance of Andy Orchard and Rosemary Beattie of the Centre for Medieval Studies in planning the workshop; of Jamie Smith, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History, and Elizabeth Archibald and Nicole Hamonic, graduate students at the Centre for Medieval Studies, in its execution; of several colleagues at the University of Toronto who moderated sessions; and of Katherine Walker, formerly of Trent, now McMaster University, for her contribution to copy-editing the manuscript. Martin Elbl typeset the volume, prepared the production versions of various maps, and finalized the camera-ready copy for printing on the presses of the Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden. Finally, we wish to record our gratitude to Herman Van der Wee of the University of Leuven for his encouragement of and participation in the workshop and for his kindness in supplying an elegant preface to this book. Lawrin Armstrong, Ivana Elbl, Martin M. Elbl September 2006
JOHN H. A. MUNRO: BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS
Monographs and Books Munro, John H. A. Wool, Cloth and Gold: The Struggle for Bullion in AngloBurgundian Trade, ca. 1340-1478. Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles; and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. Pp. xii + 242. Van Cauwenberghe, Eddy H. G., Rainer Metz, Franz Irisgler, and John Munro. Coinage in the Low Countries (14th-18th Centuries), Vol. I: AntwerpBruges-Brussels-Ghent. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988. Pp. 292. Aerts, Erik and John Munro, eds. Textiles of the Low Countries in European Economic History. Studies in Social and Economic History, Vol. 19. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990. Pp. 124. Munro, John. Bullion Flows and Monetary Policies in England and the Low Countries, 1350-1500. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 355. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1992. Pp. xvi + 312. Munro, John. Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 442. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994. Pp. xvi + 326. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History. Ed. by Joel Mokyr (editor in chief), Maristella Botticini (assistant editor), Maxine Berg, Loren Brandt, Erik Buyst, Louis Cain, Jan de Vries, Paul Lovejoy, and John Munro (area editors), in 5 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Articles in Scholarly Journals and Essays in Books and Collected Studies “Bruges and the Abortive Staple in English Cloth: An Incident in the Shift of Commerce from Bruges to Antwerp in the Late Fifteenth Century.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire/Belgisch tijdschrift voor filologie en geschiedenis 44 (1966): 1137-59; reprinted in John Munro. Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 442. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994.
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Thomson, and James McConica, eds. The Correspondence of Erasmus, Vol. 4: Letters 446 to 593, A.D. 1516 to 1517. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. “Industrial Protectionism in Medieval Flanders: Urban or National?” In The Medieval City, edited by Harry Miskimin, David Herlihy, and A. L. Udovitch, 229-68. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977; reprinted in John Munro, Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 442. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994. “Wool-Price Schedules and the Qualities of English Wools in the Later Middle Ages, ca. 1270-1499.” Textile History 9 (1978): 118-69; reprinted in John Munro, Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 442. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994. “The 1357 Wool-Price Schedule and the Decline of Yorkshire Wool Values.” Textile History 10 (1979): 211-19; reprinted in John Munro, Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 442. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994. “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange in England, 1272-1663: A Study in Monetary Management and Popular Prejudice.” In The Dawn of Modern Banking, edited by The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies of the University of California (Fredi Chiappelli, director), 169-239. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979; reprinted in John Munro, Bullion Flows and Monetary Policies in England and the Low Countries, 1350-1500. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 355. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1992. “Monetary Contraction and Industrial Change in the Late-Medieval Low Countries, 1335-1500.” In Coinage in the Low Countries, 880-1500: The Third Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History, edited by Nicholas Mayhew, 95-161. British Archeological Reports, International Series No. 54. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1979. Footnotes and headnotes on coinage, monetary, financial, and numismatic topics in the correspondence of Erasmus, in Sir Roger Mynors, Douglas Thomson, and Peter Bietenholz, eds. The Correspondence of Erasmus, Vol. 5: Letters 594 to 841, A.D. 1517 to 1518. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. “Mint Policies, Ratios, and Outputs in England and the Low Countries, 1335-1420: Some Reflections on New Data.” The Numismatic Chronicle 141 (1981): 71-116 [formerly listed as: 8th series, Vol. I]; reprinted in John Munro, Bullion Flows and Monetary Policies in England and the Low Countries,
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1350-1500. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 355. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1992. Footnotes and headnotes on coinage, monetary, financial, and numismatic topics in the correspondence of Erasmus, in Sir Roger Mynors, Douglas Thomson, and Peter Bietenholz, eds. The Correspondence of Erasmus, Vol. 6: Letters 842 to 992, A.D. 1518 to 1519. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. “Medieval Monetary Problems: Bimetallism and Bullionism.” Journal of Economic History 43 (March 1983): 294-98. “Economic Depression and the Arts in the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries.” Renaissance and Reformation 19 (1983): 235-50; reprinted in John Munro, Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of LateMedieval England and the Low Countries. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 442. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994. “The Medieval Scarlet and the Economics of Sartorial Splendour.” In Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe: Essays in Memory of Professor E. M. Carus-Wilson, edited by Negley B. Harte and Kenneth G. Ponting, 13-70. Pasold Studies in Textile History No. 2. London: The Pasold Research Fund and Heinemann Educational Books, 1983; reprinted in John Munro, Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 442. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994. “Bullion Flows and Monetary Contraction in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries.” In Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, edited by John F. Richards, 97-158. Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 1983; reprinted in John Munro, Bullion Flows and Monetary Policies in England and the Low Countries, 13501500. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 355. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1992. “Monnayage, monnaies de compte, et mutations monétaires au Brabant à la fin du moyen âge.” In Études d’histoire monétaire, XIIe- XIXe siècles, edited by John Day, 263-94. Études de l’Université de Paris VII et du Centre National des Lettres. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1984; reprinted in John Munro, Bullion Flows and Monetary Policies in England and the Low Countries, 1350-1500. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 355. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1992. “Mint Outputs, Money, and Prices in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries.” In Münzprägung, Geldumlauf und Wechselkurse/Minting, Monetary Circulation and Exchange Rates, edited by Eddy Van Cauwenberghe and Franz Irsigler, 31-122. Trierer Historische Forschungen, 7: Akten des 8th
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International Economic History Congress, Section C-7, Budapest 1982. Trier: University Press, 1984. “Hemp.” In Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols., edited by Joseph R. Strayer et al., Vol. 6, Grosseteste-Italian Literature, 153-4. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons/MacMillan, 1982-88, [1985]. “Linen.” In Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols., edited by Joseph R. Strayer et al., Vol. 7, Italian Renaissance-Mabinogi, 584-6. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons/MacMillan, 1982-88, [1986]. “Political Muscle in an Age of Monetary Famine: A Review.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 64 (1986): 741-6. Footnotes and headnotes on coinage, monetary, financial, and numismatic topics in the correspondence of Erasmus, in Sir Roger Mynors, Douglas Thomson, and Peter Bietenholz, eds. The Correspondence of Erasmus, Vol. 7: Letters 993 to 1121, A.D. 1519 to 1520. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. “Money and Coinage of the Age of Erasmus.” Appendix A, on “The Coinage of the Burgundian-Hapsburg Netherlands, Before and After 1521.” Appendix B: “Official Coinage Rates: February and August 1521.” In The Collected Works of Erasmus: Correspondence, Vol. 8: Letters 1122 to 1251, A.D. 1520 to 1521, edited by Sir Roger Mynors, Douglas Thomson, and Peter Bietenholz, 347-50. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1988. Also in this volume: Footnotes and headnotes on coinage, monetary, financial, and numismatic topics in the correspondence of Erasmus. “Scarlet.” In Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols., edited by Joseph R. Strayer et al., Vol. 11: Scandinavian Languages to Textiles, Islamic, 36-7. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons/MacMillan, 1982-88 [1988]. “Silk.” In Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols., edited by Joseph R. Strayer et al., Vol. 11: Scandinavian Languages to Textiles, Islamic, 293-6. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons/MacMillan, 1982-88 [1988]. “Textile Technology.” In Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols., edited by Joseph R. Strayer et al., Vol. 11: Scandinavian Languages to Textiles, Islamic, 693-711. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons/MacMillan, 1982-88 [1988]; reprinted in John Munro, Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 442. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994. “Textile Workers.” In Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols., edited by Joseph R. Strayer et al., Vol. 11: Scandinavian Languages to Textiles, Islamic, 711-15. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons/MacMillan, 1982-88 [1988]; reprinted in John Munro, Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries. Variorum Collected
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Studies series CS 442. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994. “Deflation and the Petty Coinage Problem in the Late-Medieval Economy: The Case of Flanders, 1334-1484.” Explorations in Economic History 25 (4) (October 1988): 387-423; reprinted in John Munro, Bullion Flows and Monetary Policies in England and the Low Countries, 1350-1500. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 355. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1992. “Petty Coinage in the Economy of Late-Medieval Flanders: Some Social Considerations of Public Minting.” In Precious Metals, Coinage and the Changes of Monetary Structures in Latin-America, Europe and Asia: Late Middle Ages-Early Modern Times, edited by Eddy H. G. Van Cauwenberghe, 25-56. Studies in Social and Economic History, Vol.2. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1989. Footnotes and headnotes on coinage, monetary, financial, and numismatic topics in the correspondence of Erasmus, in Sir Roger Mynors and James Estes, eds. The Correspondence of Erasmus, Vol. 9: Letters 1252 to 1355, A.D. 1522 to 1523. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. “Urban Regulation and Monopolistic Competition in the Textile Industries of the Late-Medieval Low Countries.” In Textiles of the Low Countries in European Economic History, edited by Erik Aerts and John Munro, 41-52. Studies in Social and Economic History, Vol. 19. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990; reprinted in John Munro, Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 442. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994. “Industrial Transformations in the North-West European Textile Trades, c. 1290–c. 1340: Economic Progress or Economic Crisis?” In Before the Black Death: Studies in the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century, edited by Bruce M. S. Campbell, 110-48. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991. Reprinted by Manchester University Press in a paperback edition in 1992; and reprinted in John Munro, Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 442. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994. “Die Anfänge der Übertragbarkeit: einige Kreditinnovationen im englischflämischen Handel des Spätmittelalters (1360-1540).” In Kredit im spätmittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Europa, edited by Michael North, 3969. Quellen und Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte, vol. 37. CologneVienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1991. “The International Law Merchant and the Evolution of Negotiable Credit in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries.” In Banchi pubblici, banchi privati e monti di pietà nell’Europa preindustriale: Amministrazione,
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tecniche operative e ruoli economici, Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, edited by Dino Puncuh, 49-80. Nuova Serie, Vol. XXXI. Genoa: Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 1991; reprinted in John Munro, Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries. Variorum Collected Studies series CS 442. Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994. “The Central European Mining Boom, Mint Outputs, and Prices in the Low Countries and England, 1450-1550.” In Money, Coins, and Commerce: Essays in the Monetary History of Asia and Europe (From Antiquity to Modern Times), edited by Eddy H. G. Van Cauwenberghe, 119-83. Studies in Social and Economic History, Vol. 2. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991. Footnotes and headnotes on coinage, monetary, financial, and numismatic topics in the correspondence of Erasmus, in Sir Roger Mynors, Alexander Dalzell, and James Estes, eds. The Correspondence of Erasmus, Vol. 10: Letters 1356 to 1534, A.D. 1523 to 1524. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), xxi, 515. Footnotes on coinage, monetary, financial, and numismatic topics in the correspondence of Erasmus, in Alexander Dalzell and Charles G. Nauert, Jr., eds. The Correspondence of Erasmus, Vol. 11: Letters 1535-1657, A.D. 1525. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, pp. xxiii, 476. “Patterns of Trade, Money, and Credit.” In Handbook of European History in the Later Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, 1400-1600, Vol. I: Structures and Assertions, edited by James Tracy, Thomas Brady Jr., and Heiko Oberman, 147-95. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994. “The Coinages of Renaissance Europe, in 1500.” In Handbook of European History in the Later Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, 1400-1600, Vol. I: Structures and Assertions, edited by James Tracy, Thomas Brady Jr., and Heiko Oberman, 671-78. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994. “Industrial Entrepreneurship in the Late-Medieval Low Countries: Urban Draperies, Fullers, and the Art of Survival.” In Entrepreneurship and the Transformation of the Economy (10th-20th Centuries): Essays in Honour of Herman Van der Wee, edited by Paul Klep and Eddy Van Cauwenberghe, 37788. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1994. “Urban Wage Structures in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries: Work-Time and Seasonal Wages.” In Labour and Leisure in Historical Perspective, Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, edited by Ian Blanchard, 65-78. Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte Beiheft series, no. 116. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1994. “Abwertung” [Debasement], “Aufwertung” [Revaluation/Renforcement], “Bullionismus” [Bullionism], “Diskont” [Discounting], “Gold-SilberRelation” [Bimetallic Mint Ratios], “Greschamsches Gesetz” [Gresham’s Law],
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“Inhaber-Klausel” [Order Clause], “Inhaber-Schuldschein” [Bill Obligatory], “Instrumentum ex Causa Cambii,” “Münzkosten” [Brassage], “Schlagschatz” [Seigniorage], “Wechsel” [Bill of Exchange]. In Von Aktie bis Zoll: Ein historisches Lexikon des Geldes, edited by Michael North, 15-6, 26, 66-7, 85-7, 142-4, 146-7, 171-2, 172-4, 174-5, 263, 357, 413-8. Munich: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1995. “Textiles.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, edited by William W. Kibler, Grover Zinn, John Bell Henneman, Lawrence Earp, and William Clark, Vol. II: Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, 903-5. New York and London: Garland Press, 1995. “Anglo-Flemish Competition in the International Cloth Trade, 13401520.” Publication du centre européen d’études bourguigonnes, 35 (1995): 37-60 [Rencontres d’Oxford (septembre 1994): L’Angleterre et les Pays Bas bourguignons: relations et comparaisons, XVe-XVIe siècle, edited by Jean-Marie Cauchies]. “Varieties of Medieval Latinity, Section FJ: ‘Textiles’.” In Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, edited by Frank A. C. Mantello and A. George Rigg, 474-84. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996. “The Origins of the English ‘New Draperies’: The Resurrection of an Old Flemish Industry, 1270-1570.” In The New Draperies in the Low Countries and England, 1300-1800, edited by Negley B. Harte, 35-127. Pasold Studies in Textile History no. 10. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. “Crisis and Change in the Later Medieval English Economy.” Journal of Economic History 58 (1) (March 1998): 215-9. Review article based on Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller, edited by Richard Britnell and John Hatcher. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. “Cloth Manufacture and Trade.” In Medieval England: An Encyclopedia, edited by Paul Sarmach, M. Teresa Tavormina, and Joel Rosenthal, 194-7. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998. “Precious Metals and the Origins of the Price Revolution Reconsidered: The Conjuncture of Monetary and Real Forces in the European Inflation of the Early to Mid-Sixteenth Century.” In Monetary History in Global Perspective, 1500-1808. Proceedings of the Twelfth International Economic History Congress at Madrid, August 1998, edited by Clara Eugenia Núñez, 35-50. Seville: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1998. “Textiles as Articles of Consumption in Flemish Towns, 1330-1575.” Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis 81 (1-3) (1998): 275-88. Special issue on: ‘Proeve ‘t al, ‘t is prysselyck’: Verbruik in Europese steden (13de-18de eeuw)/Consumption in the West European City (13th-18th Century): Liber Amicorum Raymond Van Uytven. With a Dutch summary.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS
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Edmund King, Peterborough Abbey, 1086-1310: A Study in the Land Market (1975), reviewed in The Journal of Economic History 36 (1976): 767. B. H. Slicher Van Bath et al., eds., Acta Historiae Neerlandicae (Studies in the History of the Netherlands), 6 (1973), reviewed in Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 55 (1977): 327-9. Maureen Mazzaoui, The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages, 1100-1600 (1981), reviewed in Business History Review 56 (1982): 487-8. Terence H. Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England in the High Middle Ages (1982), reviewed in the American Historical Review 88 (1983): 661. Artur Attman, The Bullion Flow Between Europe and the East, 1000-1750 (1981), reviewed in The Journal of Economic History 43 (Sept. 1983): 748-9. Kathryn Reyerson, Business, Banking, and Finance in Medieval Montpellier (1985), reviewed in The Canadian Journal of History 21 (Dec. 1986): 411-3. Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (1983), reviewed in The Journal of Economic History 46 (Dec. 1986): 1044-6. Harry Miskimin, Money and Power in Fifteenth-Century France (1984), reviewed in Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 64 (1986): 741-6. James D. Tracy, A Financial Revolution in the Habsburg Netherlands: Renten and Renteniers in the County of Holland, 1515-1565 (1985), in The American Historical Review 92 (April 1987): 434-5. Raymond Goldsmith, Premodern Financial Systems: A Historical Comparative Study (1987), reviewed in The Journal of Economic History, 48 (September 1988): 807-9. Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange (1986), reviewed in Speculum: Journal of Medieval Studies 63 (October 1988): 998-1000. Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (1986), reviewed in The Journal of Modern History 60 (December 1988): 735-7. Terence Lloyd, England and the German Hanse: A Study of Their Trade and Diplomacy (1991), reviewed in The American Historical Review 98 (Oct. 1993): 1233-4. John J. McCusker and Cora Gravesteijn, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism: The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate Currents, and Money Currents of Early Modern Europe (1991), reviewed in The American Historical Review 99 (April 1994): 544. Elizabeth Gemmill and Nicholas Mayhew, Changing Values in Medieval Scotland: A Study of Prices, Money, and Weights and Measures (1995), reviewed in Albion: Journal of British Studies 28 (3) (Fall 1996): 542-4.
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Richard Britnell and John Hatcher, eds., Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller (1996), reviewed in Journal of Economic History 58 (1) (March 1998): 215-9. David Jacoby, Trade, Commodities, and Shipping in the Medieval Mediterranean. Variorum Collected Studies Series CS572 (1997), reviewed in The International History Review 21 (1) (March 1999): 17-9. David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (1996), reviewed for EH.Net Review <[email protected]>, 24 February 1999. Jean Favier, Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages, trans. Caroline Higgitt (1998), reviewed for The International History Review 21 (4) (December 1999): 976-8. S. M. H. Bozorgnia, The Role of Precious Metals in European Economic Development from Roman Times to the Eve of the Industrial Revolution, Contributions in Economics and Economic History no. 192 (1998), reviewed for Journal of Economic History 59 (4) (December 1999), 1090-1. Robert-Henri Bautier and Janine Sornay, eds., Les Sources de l’histoire économique et sociale du moyen âge. Les états de la maison de Bourgogne, tome II: Archives centrales de l’État bourguignon (1384-1500), vol. I/1: Archives des principautés du Sud and, vol. I/2, Les principautés du Nord (supplément), Institut du Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, and Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis (2001), reviewed for the Journal of Economic History 62 (3) (September 2002): 856-7. François Crouzet, A History of the European Economy, 1000-2000 (2001), reviewed for The Journal of Economic Literature 40 (September 2002): 956-7. Philip Jacks and William Caferro, The Spinelli of Florence: Fortunes of a Renaissance Merchant Family ( 2001), reviewed for The International History Review 24 (4) (December 2002): 876-7. Sevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (2000), reviewed in “EH.Net Review” <[email protected]>, 1 November 2002. Alan Stahl, Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages (2000), reviewed for Medieval Prosopography 23 (2002): 319-23. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy. Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300-900 (2001), reviewed for The International Journal of Maritime History 15 (2) (December 2003): 377-80. Roger Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, 1485-1547 (2004), reviewed for <eh [email protected]>, 15 June 2005. Stuart J. Borsch, The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study (2005), reviewed for <eh [email protected]>, 13 March 2006.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS
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Working Papers Posted on the Internet Working Paper Archive of Department of Economics and Institute for Policy Analysis (http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ecipa/archive/) “The Maze of Medieval Mint Metrology in Flanders, France and England: Determining the Weight of the Marc de Troyes and the Tower Pound from the Economics of Counterfeiting.” JEL Classification: N1, N2, N4, E4, E5; READ PAPER/PDF [111 Kbytes]; [UT- ECIPA-MUNRO-98-01]; http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ecipa/archive/ UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-98-01.html “The ‘Industrial Crisis’ of the English Textile Towns, 1290-1330.” JEL Classification: N1, N6, N7, L1; READ PAPER/PDF [285 Kbytes]; [UTECIPA-MUNRO-98-02]; http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ecipa/archive/UTECIPA-MUNRO-98-02.html “The Symbiosis of Towns and Textiles: Urban Institutions and the Changing Fortunes of Cloth Manufacturing in the Low Countries and England, 1280-1570.” JEL Classification: N1, N3, N4, N6, N7; READ PAPER/PDF [296KBytes]; [UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-98-03] READ PAPER/PDF [296KBytes]; http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ecipa/archive/UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-98-03.html “Textiles as Articles of Consumption in Flemish Towns, 1330-1575.” JEL Classification: N3, N6, N7, L1, J3; READ PAPER/PDF [66 Kbytes]; [UTECIPA-MUNRO-98-04]; http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ecipa/archive/UTECIPA-MUNRO-98-04.html “Monetary Policies, Guild Labour-Strife, and Compulsory Arbitration during the Decline of the Late-Medieval Flemish Cloth Industry, 13901435.” JEL Classification: N1, N3, N4, N6, L1, J2, J3, E3, E4, F2; READ PAPER/PDF [159 Kbytes]; [UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-98-05]; http://www.chass. utoronto.ca/ecipa/archive/UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-98-05.html “English ‘Backwardness’ and Financial Innovations in Commerce with the Low Countries, 14th to 16th Centuries.” JEL Classification: N1, N2, N4, N7, E5l; READ PAPER/PDF [251 Kbytes] [UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-98-06]; http://www. chass.utoronto.ca/ecipa/archive/UT- ECIPA-MUNRO-98-06.html “The Low Countries’ Export Trade in Textiles with the Mediterranean Basin, 1200-1600: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Comparative Advantages in Overland and Maritime Trade Routes.” JEL Classification: F1, F2, L1, N6, N7; READ PAPER/PDF [137 Kbytes]; [UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-99-01]; http://www.chass. utoronto.ca/ecipa/ archive/UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-99-01.html “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.” JEL Classification: E3, E5, E6, F4, G2, H5, H6, N1, N2, N7; READ PAPER/PDF [211 Kbytes]; [UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-99-02]; http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ecipa/ archive/UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-99-02.html
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JOHN H. A. MUNRO
“The ‘New Institutional Economics’ and the Changing Fortunes of Fairs in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: the Textile Trades, Warfare, and Transaction Costs.” JEL Classification: F1, F3-4, G2, K2, K4, N2, N4, N7, R4; READ PAPER/PDF [1580 Kbytes]; UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-00-01; http:// www.chass.utoronto.ca/ecipa/archive/UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-00-01.html “Flemish Woollens and German Commerce during the Later Middle Ages: Changing Trends in Cloth Prices and Markets,1290-1550.” JEL Classification: F1-2, J3, L1-2, L6, N4, N6-7; READ PAPER/PDF [1581 Kbytes]; [UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-00-02]; http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ecipa/archive/ UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-00-02.html “Wage Stickiness, Monetary Changes, and Real Incomes in Late- Medieval England and the Low Countries, 1300-1470: Did Money Really Matter?” JEL Classification: F4, J1, J3, J4, J5, N1, N3, N4, N6; READ PAPER/PDF [538 Kbytes] [UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-00-03]; http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ ecipa/archive/UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-00-03.html “Figures 1-34: Wage Stickiness, Monetary Changes, and Real Incomes in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries.” PDF [29.3 Mbytes]; http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/munro5/RWCharts3.pdf “The West European Woollen Industries and their Struggles for International Markets, c. 1000-1500.” JEL Classification: F1, F2, F3, F4, H2, H3, J3, J5. K2, L1, L6, N2, N3, N4, N5, N6, N7, N8; READ PAPER/PDF [2872 Kbytes]; [UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-00-04]; http://www.chass.utoronto. ca/ecipa/archive/UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-00-04.html “Wool and Wool-Based Textiles in the West European Economy, c. 8001500: Innovations and Traditions in Textile Products, Technology, and Industrial Organisation.” JEL Classification: F1, F2, F3, F4, H2, H3, J3, J5. K2, L1, L6, N2, N3, N4, N5, N6, N7, N8; READ PAPER/PDF [1320 Kbytes]; [UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-00-05]; http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ecipa/ archive/UT- ECIPA-MUNRO-00-05.html “Money, Wages, and Real Incomes in the Age of Erasmus: The Purchasing Power of Coins and of Building Craftsmen’s Wages in England and the Low Countries, 1500-1540.” JEL Classification: B0, E3, E4, E5, E6, F2, F4, J1, J2, J3, J4, J6, N1, N3, N4, N7, Q1 READ PAPER/PDF [717 Kbytes]; [UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-01-01]; http://www.economics.utoronto. ca/ecipa/archive/UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-01-01. html “The Origins of the Modern Financial Revolution: Responses to Impediments from Church and State in Western Europe, 1200-1600.” JEL Classification: B1, E5, E6, F3, F4, G1, G2, H3, H6, K4, N2, N4, P5; READ PAPER/PDF [400 Kbytes]; [UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-01-02.html]; http://www. economics.utoronto.ca/ecipa/archive/UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-01-02.html “Industrial Energy from Water-Mills in the European Economy, Fifth to Eighteenth Centuries: The Limitations of Power.” JEL Classification: L6,
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6FKRODUO\&RQIHUHQFH3DSHUVDQG,QYLWHG/HFWXUHV ´%UXJHV DQG WKH $ERUWLYH 6WDSOH LQ (QJOLVK &ORWK $Q ,QFLGHQW LQ WKH 6KLIW RI &RPPHUFH IURP %UXJHV WR $QWZHUS LQ WKH /DWH )LIWHHQWK &HQWXU\µ3DSHUGHOLYHUHGWRWKH&DQDGLDQ+LVWRULFDO$VVRFLDWLRQ$QQXDO 0HHWLQJ -XQH DW WKH 8QLYHUVLW\ RI %ULWLVK &ROXPELD ´7KH7UDQVIRUPDWLRQRI)OHPLVK&ORWK3URGXFWLRQFF 7KH 5HVSRQVHV WR &KDQJLQJ )DFWRU &RVWV DQG 0DUNHW 'HPDQGµ 3DSHU GHOL YHUHGWRWKH3RVWJUDGXDWH:RUNVKRSLQ(FRQRPLF+LVWRU\RIWKH&HQWUXP YRRU(FRQRPLVFKH6WXGLsQRIWKH.DWKROLHNH8QLYHUVLWHLWWH/HXYHQ /RX
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS
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vain, Belgium) on 12 March 1971 (and published by this institute in mimeographed form as Report No. 7103 of the Centrum voor Economische Studiën). This paper was subsequently delivered also to the Seminarie voor Streeks- en Agrarische Geschiedenis of the Rijksuniversiteit Gent (Ghent, Belgium), on 25 March 1971. “La lutte bullioniste anglo-bourguignonne: sa contribution à la chute de l’industrie drapière de luxe et à l’essor des nouvelles draperies en Flandre et en Brabant, 1430-1480.” Paper delivered to the Seminarie voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis of the Vrije Universiteit te Brussel (Brussels, Belgium) on 19 April 1971. “Depression and Culture in Fifteenth-Century Flanders and Brabant.” Paper delivered to the American Musicological Society, 32nd Annual Meeting, at Duke University (Durham, North Carolina) on 18 November 1971. A précis of this paper has been published in Abstracts of Papers Delivered to the Thirty-Second Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society (Chapel Hill and Durham, N.C., 1971), 40-1. “The Coming of Spanish Wools to the Low Countries: An Industrial Transformation of the Fifteenth Century.” Paper delivered to the Midwest Medieval Conference, 11th Annual Meeting, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, on 6 October 1973. Also delivered to the Economic History Workshop, University of Toronto, in November 1973. “Scarlets and the High Cost of Dyeing in the Middle Ages.” Paper delivered to the Colloquium on Medieval Textiles in the Mediterranean Basin, in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, at the Royal Ontario Museum of Toronto, on 11 May 1977. “Mint Outputs, Monetary Change, and Economic Contraction in LateMedieval England and the Low Countries.” Paper delivered to the Comparative World History Workshop: Conference on Pre-Modern Monetary History, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 30 August-3 September 1977. “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange in England, 1272-1663: A Study in Monetary Management and Popular Prejudice.” Paper presented to the Conference on “The Dawn of Banking”, at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 23-26 September 1977. “Scarlets and the Economics of Sartorial Splendour in the Middle Ages.” A revised version of “Scarlet and the High Cost of Dyeing in the Middle Ages,” delivered to the “Five Colleges Medieval Seminar” at the University of Massachusetts, at Amherst, Mass. on 5 December 1977; and again to the Social History Group of Ontario (Toronto) on 5 February 1978. “Bullion Movements and Monetary Contraction in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries. 1235-1500 A.D.” A revised version of “Mint Out-
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puts, Monetary Change, and Economic Contraction in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries,” delivered to the University of Toronto Economic History Workshop, on 16 January 1978. “Monetary Contraction, Depression, and Industrial Change in the Late Medieval Low Countries, 1335-1500.” Paper delivered to the “Third Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History: Coinage and Economic Development in the Low Countries,” on 10 September 1978. “The Medieval Scarlet and the Economics of Sartorial Splendour.” A very considerably revised and expanded version of “Scarlets and the Economics of Sartorial Splendour in the Middle Ages,” delivered to the University of Toronto Economic History Workshop, on 20 October 1980. “Economic Depression and Culture in the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries.” A much revised version of “Depression and Culture in FifteenthCentury Flanders and Brabant,” delivered to University College Symposium Four, “The Renaissance: Rediscovery and Exploration,” at the University of Toronto, on 21 January 1982. “Mint Outputs, Money, and Prices in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries.” Paper delivered to the Theme C-7 section, on “Minting and Monetary Circulation,” of the 8th International Economic History Congress, Budapest, 18 August 1982. “The Late-Medieval Bullion Famine and Deflation in North-West Europe: A Critique of the Postan Thesis.” Paper delivered to the Workshop on “Medieval Monetary Problems: Bimetallism and Bullionism,” at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association, 23 September 1982, Baltimore, Maryland. “The Luxury Trades of the Silk Road: How Much Did Silks and Spices Really Cost?” Paper delivered to the Royal Ontario Museum Continuing Education Symposium “Silk Roads—China Ships,” 12 October 1983, University of Toronto. “The Fullers’ Guild and Industrial Strife in the Low Countries, 13401500.” Paper delivered to the Thirteenth Medieval Workshop, University of British Columbia, “Late Medieval Urban Institutions,” 19 November 1983. “Minting, Moneys-of-Account, and Monetary Change in Late-Medieval Brabant.” Paper delivered to the Economic History Workshop, University of Toronto, 5 December 1983. “Inflation, Deflation, and the Big Problem of Petty Coinage in LateMedieval Flanders, 1334-1484.” Paper delivered to the Nineteenth International Congress of Medieval Studies, at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, on 13 May 1984. “Flemish Textile Production and the Changing Structure of Market De-
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mand, 1270-1500.” Paper presented to the 44th Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association, 21-23 September 1984, at Chicago, Illinois. “Industrial Change in Textile Manufacturing in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Responses to Market Adversities.” Invited lecture given at Rutgers University, Department of History and Center for Medieval Studies (New Brunswick, New Jersey), 16 April 1985. “The Nature of Price Changes in the Late-Medieval Economy: A Critique of the Postan Thesis.” Lecture-seminar given at Rutgers University, Department of History and Center for Medieval Studies (New Brunswick, New Jersey), 17 April 1985. “Environment, Land Management, and the Changing Qualities of English Wools in the Later Middle Ages.” Paper presented to the 20th International Congress on Medieval Studies, 10 May 1985, at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan. “The Role of Petty Coinage in Monetary and Price Fluctuations in the Low Countries, 1334-1484.” Public lecture sponsored by the Department of History, University of Trier, Federal Republic of Germany, 7 June 1985. “Petty Coinage in the Economy of Late-Medieval Flanders: Some Social Considerations of Public Minting.” Paper presented to The Stockton Colloquium of 1985: “Production and Transfer of Precious Metals and Changes in the Monetary Structures of Latin America and Europe, 15001800,” at the University of the Pacific, Stockton, California, on 3 October 1985. “The Behaviour of Wages During Deflation in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries.” Paper presented to the Ninth International Economic History Congress, 26 August 1986, in Bern, Switzerland. “Structural Changes in Late-Medieval Textile Manufacturing: The Flemish Responses to Market Adversities, 1300-1500.” Public lecture delivered at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Louvain, Belgium) on 5 November 1986. “Wage Movements and Deflation in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries.” Public lecture delivered to the Universitaire Faculteiten SintIgnatius, Universiteit Antwerpen (Antwerp, Belgium) on 13 November 1986. “The Central European Silver Mining Boom, Mint Outputs, and Prices in the Low Countries and England, 1450-1550.” Paper delivered to the Second International Conference on “The Production and Transfer of Precious Metals and Monetary Structures in Asia, America, and Europe, 15th to 19th Centuries,” at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan, on 9 June 1987.
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“Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Industrial Urbanization in the Low Countries, 1200-1600.” Paper presented to the conference “An Urban Context: Medieval and Modern Cities,” organized by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Arizona State College of Business, at Phoenix, Arizona, on 26 March 1988. “The Flemish ‘New Draperies’: The Death and Resurrection of an Old Industry, 13th to 16th Centuries.” Paper presented to the Anglo-Low Countries Conference on the New Draperies, sponsored by the Pasold Research Fund, London, and the Workshop on Quantitative Economic History, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, at Leuven, Belgium, on 14 April 1988. “The New Draperies: The Death and Resurrection of an Old Flemish Industry, Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries.” Paper presented to the Economic History Workshop, University of Toronto, on 24 October 1988. [Revised and extended version of “The Flemish ‘New Draperies’: The Death and Resurrection of an Old Industry, 13th to 16th Centuries”]. “Oriental Spices and Their Costs in Medieval Cuisine: Luxuries or Necessities?” Lecture delivered to the Canadian Perspectives Committee, Senior Alumni Association, University of Toronto, at University College, 8 November 1988. “International and Local Banking in Medieval and Renaissance England.” Paper delivered to the International School on the History of Banking and Finance (University of Siena-C.N.R.), at the Certosa di Pontignano, Siena, Italy, on 20 June 1989. “Industrial Transformations in the Northern Textile Trades, ca. 1290-ca. 1350: Economic Progress or Economic Crisis?” Paper delivered to the Historical Geography Research Group, Third Anglo-American Seminar on the Medieval Economy and Society, held at Chester College, Chester, England, on 15 July 1989. “On the Origins of Negotiability: Some Credit Innovations in AngloFlemish Trade, c. 1360–c. 1540.” Paper delivered to the Second SalzauKolloquium, “Kredit im Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” sponsored by Die Ministerin für Bildung, Wissenschaft, Jugend und Kultur des Landes Schleswig-Holstein und die Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, held at the Herrenhaus Salzau, Schleswig-Holstein, 23 April 1990. “Monetary, Price, and Wage Fluctuations during the Late-Medieval ‘Great Depression’: Did Money Matter?” Paper delivered to the Tenth International Economic History Congress, Session C.16: “The Economic Depression of the Renaissance Revisited,” at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Leuven, Belgium, 21 August 1990. “Urban Regulation and Monopolistic Competition in the Textile Industries of the Late-Medieval Low Countries.” Paper delivered to the Tenth Inter-
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national Economic History Congress, Session B-15: “Textiles of the Low Countries in European Economic History,” at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Leuven, Belgium, on 23 August 1990. “The International Law Merchant and the Origins of Negotiable Credit in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries.” Paper presented to the Convegno internazionale: “Banchi pubblici, banchi privati e monti di pietà nell’Europa preindustriale: amministrazione, tecniche operative, e ruoli economici,” held at the Università di Genova, Genoa, Italy, on 2 October 1990. “On the Origins of Negotiability: Credit Instruments and the Law Merchant in Anglo-Flemish Commerce, 1353-1507.” Paper presented to the Economic History Workshop, University of Toronto, on 5 November 1990. “The Belgian Archives.” Lecture delivered to the Centre for Medieval Studies, Sources and Resources Committee, at the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, on 22 March 1991. “Coinage Debasement as a Fiscal Policy: The Economics and Mechanics of Medieval Mint Manipulations.” Paper delivered to the 38th Annual Convention of The Canadian Numismatic Association, 1991 Educational Forum, at the Westbury Hotel, Toronto, Ontario, on 26 July 1991. “Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Urban Institutions in the Decline of the Medieval Flemish Woollens Industry, ca. 1350-1500.” Paper delivered to the 27th International Congress on Medieval Studies, at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, on 7 May 1992. “Bimetallic Ratios, Exchange Rates, and Labour Strife in the LateMedieval Flemish Cloth Industry.” Paper delivered to the Annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, on 2 April 1993; Labour Economics Workshop, Department of Economics, University of Toronto, on 8 April 1993; Economic History Workshop, Northwestern University, at Evanston, Illinois, on 22 April 1993; Economic History Workshop, University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, on 23 April 1993. “Monetary Fluctuations, Entrepreneurship, and Labor Strife in the Flemish Textile Industry, 1390-1435.” Paper delivered to the 28th International Congress on Medieval Studies, at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, on 6 May 1993. “Monetary Policies, Wage Fluctuations, and Labour Strife in the LateMedieval Flemish Cloth Industry, 1390-1435.” Paper delivered to the Economic History Workshop, University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario), on 23 November 1993. “Maritime and Overland Trade in Textiles between the Low Countries and Italy, 1200-1600: Which was the More Cost Effective?” Paper delivered to the 29th International Congress on Medieval Studies, at Western
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Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan), Session 201 (“Trade and Transit Markets in Northwestern Europe, 1350-1550"), on 6 May 1994. “The True Weights of the Marcs de Troyes in Late-Medieval France and Flanders: Evidence from Flemish Counterfeiting and Monetary Ordinances, 1388-1469.” Paper delivered to the First International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, Session 419: Medieval Arithmetic and Calculation, on 5 July 1994. “Urban Wage Structures in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries: Work-Time and Seasonal Wages.” Paper delivered to the 11th International Economic History Congress, Session B-3a, “Labour and Leisure in Historical Perspective, Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries,” at the Università Bocconi, Milan, on 13 September 1994. “Anglo-Flemish Competition in the International Cloth Trade, ca. 1340-1520: Endogenous and Exogenous Factors in the English ‘Victory’.” Paper delivered to the Colloque d’Oxford, of the Centre Européen des Études Bourguignonnes, at St. John’s College, Oxford, on 24 September 1994. Revised version delivered to the Economic History Workshop, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 14 April 1995. “Flemish Woollens and Hanseatic Commerce during the Later Middle Ages: Changing Trends in Markets and Cloth Prices, 1290-1550. [38 pp.]. Paper presented to the Hanseatic conference, at the Burgkloster zu Lübeck, 10-12 March 1997, “Wirtschaftliche Wechsellagen im hansischen Wirtschaftsraum, 1300-1800: Vergleichende konjunkturstatistische und wirtschaftsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Wirtschafts- und Handelsgeschichte im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit.” Lecture presented to the Department of History, Universiteit Antwerpen—Universiteit Faculteiten Sint-Ignatius te Antwerpen, 11 December 1997. “Real Wage Determination and the Problem of Nominal Wage- Stickiness in the Late-Medieval European Economy.” Seminar paper delivered to the Graduate Students Workshop, ECO 4060Y, Economics Department, University of Toronto, on 27 March 1997. “The ‘Industrial Crisis’ of the English Textile Towns, c. 1290-c. 1330.” [64 pp.] Paper presented to the Seventh Annual Conference on ThirteenthCentury England, at St. Aidan’s College, University of Durham, 1-4 September 1997. “English ‘Backwardness’ and Financial Innovations in Commerce with the Low Countries, 14th to 16th centuries.” [58 pp.] Paper presented to the Colloque Universiteit Gent—Universiteit Antwerpen (IUAP—Stedelijke Samenlevingen in de Laatmiddeleeuwse Nederlanden): “Internationale Handel in de Nederlanden (14de-16de eeuw: Kooplieden, Organisatie en Infrastructure/International Trade in the Low Countries (14th-16th centuries): Merchants, Organisation, and Infrastructure),”at the Universiteit Antwerpen, 13 December 1997.
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“Disputes About Mint Metrology in Late-Medieval Flanders, France and England: Determining the Weight of the Marc de Troyes and the Tower Pound from the Economics of Counterfeiting, 1388-1469.” [29 pp.] Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Classical and Medieval Numismatics Society, at the Primrose Hotel, Toronto, on 21 February 1998. “The ‘Industrial Crisis’ of the English Textile Towns, c. 1290-c. 1330.” [64 pp.] A revised version of “The ‘Industrial Crisis’ of the English Textile Towns, c. 1290-c. 1330” above. Delivered to the Center for Early Modern History, at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis), on 6 March 1998. “Precious Metals and the Origins of the Price Revolution Reconsidered: The Conjuncture of Monetary and Real Forces in the European Inflation of the Early to Mid-Sixteenth Century.” [56 pp.] Paper presented to Session B.6, “Monetary History in Global Perspective, 1500-1808,” at the Twelfth International Economic History Congress in Madrid, 25 August 1998. “The Low Countries (Export Trade in Textiles with the Mediterranean Basin, 1200-1600: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Comparative Advantages in Overland and Maritime Trade Routes.” [32 pp.] Paper presented to Session C.2: “Means of Communication, Spread of Information and European and Mediterranean Commerce, 10th-17th Centuries,” at the Twelfth International Economic History Congress, in Madrid, 26 August 1998. “Determinanten der Entwicklung von Preisen, Löhnen unde des Geldes, 1135-1820/The Chief Determinants of Price, Wage, and Monetary Movements in Western Europe, 1135-1820: A New View of ‘Long-Waves’.” [39 pp.] A paper presented to the conference “Wirtschaftliche Wechsellagen im hansischen Wirtschaftsraum 1300-1800: Verleichende konjunkturstatistische und wirtschaftsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Wirtschafts- und Handelsgeschichte im Spätmittelater und in der frühen Neuzeit,” at Lübeck, Germany, on 30 July 1999. “Wage-Stickiness, Monetary Changes, and Real Incomes in Late- Medieval England and the Low Countries, 1300-1450.” [49 pp.] Paper presented to the international conference on “New Trends in Late Medieval Studies,” at The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 24 August 1999. Commentator on three papers in 19th-century German Demography: Stephan Klasen (Munich), “Gender Bias in Mortality in a Comparative Perspective: Excess Female Mortality in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries;” Terence McIntosh (North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “Urban Demographic Stagnation in Early Modern Southwest Germany: A Computer Simulation;” Simone Wegge, “Self-Selection of NineteenthCentury German Emigrants: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Hesse-
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Cassel.” Papers presented at the First Conference on German Cliometrics, at the Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, 23-26 September 1999. “The ‘New Institutional Economics’ and the Changing Fortunes of Fairs in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Transaction Costs, Warfare, and Textiles( [54 pp.] Paper presented to the Annual Conference, the 32nd Settimana di Studio, of the Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “Francesco Datini,” on “Fiere e mercati nella integrazione delle economie europee, secoli XIII-XVIII,” in Prato, Italy, 10 May 2000; Revised version of the paper presented to the Economic History Workshop, Department of Economics, University of Waterloo, on 13 October 2000. “Wage Stickiness, Monetary Changes, and Real Incomes in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries, 1300-1470: Did Money Really Matter?” [93 pp.] Paper presented to the Economic History and Labour Workshops, Department of Economics, University of Toronto, on 23 February 2001; Paper presented to the Workshop in Money, History, and Finance, Department of Economics, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey): on 26 March 2001. Commentary on and Agenda for “Symposium: New Approaches to International Trade, c. 1000-1500.” For the Seventh Anglo-American Seminar on the Medieval Economy and Society, held at Trinity College Dublin and the Royal Irish Academy, in Dublin, 13-16 July 2001. “The Late Medieval Origins of the Modern Financial Revolution: Responses to Impediments from Church and State in Western Europe.” Paper presented to the 61st Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association, on Finance and Economic Modernization, at Loew’s Philadelphia Hotel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 26 October 2001. “Industrial Energy from Water-Mills in the European Economy, Fifth to Eighteenth Centuries: the Limitations of Power.” Paper presented to the 34th annual meeting of the Settimana di Studio, Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “Francesco Datini da Prato,” on the theme “Economia ed energia, secoli XIII-XVIII,” in Prato, Italy, on 16 April 2002. “Prices, Wages, and Prospects for ‘Profit Inflation’ in England, Brabant, and Spain, 1501-1670: A Comparative Analysis.” Paper presented to Session 15: “Global Monies and Price Histories, XVIth-XVIIIth Centuries,” of the XIIIth International Economic History Congress, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 22 July 2002. “Industrial Change in the Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Low Countries: The Arrival of Spanish Merino Wools and the Expansion of the ‘Nouvelles Draperies’.” Paper presented to Session 16: “Wool: Products and Markets (XIIIth-XXth Centuries),” of the XIIIth International Economic History Congress, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 26 July 2002.
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“Postan, Population, and Prices in Late-Medieval England and Flanders.” Paper presented to the Colloque de Montréal: Postan-Duby: Destin d’un paradigme. Peut-on comprendre les crises économiques de la fin du moyen âge sans le modèle malthusien? Montréal: Université de Québec à Montréal, 10 October 2002. “The Late-Medieval Origins of the Modern Financial Revolution: Overcoming Impediments from Church and State.” Paper presented to the Economic History Workshop, Department of Economics, University of Toronto; in the Coach House Conference Room, on 17 April 2003. “‘Builders’ Wages in Southern England and the Southern Low Countries, 1346-1500: A Comparative Study of Trends in and Levels of Real Incomes.” Paper presented to the the 36th annual meeting of the Settimana di Studio, Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “Francesco Datini da Prato,” on the theme “Economia ed energia, secoli XIII-XVIII;” in Prato, Italy, on 30 April 2004, on the theme: “L’Edilizia prima della Rivoluzione Industriale, Secoli XIII-XVIII,” Prato, 26-30 aprile 2004. “Changing Patterns of Colours and Values of Woollen Textiles in the Southern Low Countries, 1300-1550: The Anti-Red Shift—to the Dark Side.” Paper presented to the 12th International Medieval Congress, at Leeds, England, on 12 July 2005 (to session 804: “Transforming Textiles”). Commentary on the paper of Maristella Botticini, “Social Norms, Demographic Shocks, and Dowries in Florence, 1250-1450.” Presented to the 68th Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association, on “War and Economic Growth,” Session 4A, “Bombs, Germs, and Invaders,” Westin Harbour Castle Hotel, Toronto, Ontario, 17 September 2005. “Flemish Woollens and Hanseatic German Commerce During the Later Middle Ages: Changing Trends in Cloth Markets and Textile Values, 1290-1570.” Paper presented to the conference on “Medieval Global Economies,” The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, 11 November 2005. “Real Wages and the ‘Malhusian Problem’ in Anwerp and South-Eastern England, 1400-1700: A Regional Comparison of Levels and Trends in Real Wages for Building Craftsmen.” Paper presented to the Second Dutch-Flemish conference on “The Economy and Society of the Low Countries in the Pre-Industrial Period,” Universiteit Antwerp, 20 April 2006. “South-German Silver, European Textiles, and Venetian Trade with the Levant and Ottoman Empire, c. 1370 to c. 1720: A Non-mercantilist Approach to the Balance of Payments Problem.” Presented to the XXXXVIII (38th) Settimana di Studio, Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “Francesco Datini,” “Relazioni economiche tra Europa e mondo islamico, Secoli XIII-XVIII,” 5 May 2006.
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Research Projects in Progress (for more detailed information see http://www.economics.utoronto/munro5/) “Wage Structures and Wage Movements in Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries: 1260-1530.” “Recasting the Phelps Brown-Hopkins Price-Index for the ‘Basket of Consumables’, 1264-1700.” “The Mint Outputs and Monetary Statistics of the Low Countries, 13341789.” “Cloth Prices in the Low Countries (1300-1570) for: Forschungsprojekt “Wirtschaftliche Wechsellagen im hansischen Wirtschaftsraum, 1300-1800.”
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LAW, ETHICS AND ECONOMY: GERARD OF SIENA AND GIOVANNI D’ANDREA ON USURY1 Lawrin Armstrong
In the Threepenny Opera, Brecht, in the character of Mackie Messer, asks, “what’s robbing a bank compared to founding a bank?”2 He was expressing an ethical critique of usury that he probably knew via Marx’s Capital, but which had originated as early as the fourth century B.C., when Aristotle, in the Politics and the Ethics, condemned profit on loans as an unnatural and asocial use of money, which is a measure of value and medium of exchange, not a source of value in itself.3 Medieval ethicists and jurists were in agreement 1
This paper is offered to John Munro, mentor and colleague, on the occasion of his retirement. The usury prohibition has long been of interest to Munro, and my own research on the topic was inspired by his 1987-1988 graduate seminar on the “Dynamics of the European Economy, 1350-1750.” An earlier version of the paper was presented at the panel on “Ethics and the Higher Learning” at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in Cambridge, April 2005, and I am grateful for the critical comments I received from colleagues there. The following legal abbreviations have been used in the notes: Inst. (Institutiones Iustiniani); Dig. (Digesta Iustiniani); Decretum Grat. (Decretum Gratiani); X (Decretales Gregorii IX); VI (Liber Sextus Decretalium Bonifacii VIII); and Clem. (Constitutiones clementinae). Reference is to the critical editions: Theodor Mommsen et al., eds., Corpus iuris civilis, 3 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1872-1895); and Emil Friedberg, ed., Corpus iuris canonici, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1959). Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. 2 “Was ist ein Einbruch in eine Bank gegen die Gründung einer Bank?” Bertolt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper, Act 9, in Ausgewählte Werke, vol. 1: Stücke 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 267. A similar remark is commonly attributed to Brecht: “Bank robbery is the business of amateurs: the real professionals found a bank” (“Bankraub ist eine Unternehmung von Dilettanten. Wahre Profis gründen eine Bank”). 3 “There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honourable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest [tokos, lit. parturition, offspring], which means the birth of money from money, is
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with Aristotle and Marx: to profit from a money loan was a violation of the function of money and an offence against justice. The objective of this paper is to consider the relationship between medieval ethics and law with regard to the problem of usury, which medieval and early modern theorists—including, it should be noted, Protestant reformers such as Luther and Melancthon—regarded as any profit on a loan of money or fungible goods.4 I shall do so by applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural,” Aristotle, Politics 1.10.1258a-b, trans. Benjamin Jowett in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1141. Aristotle touches on usury in the Ethics in a discussion of liberality, where he includes the usurer in the species of the miserly who “exceed in respect of taking by taking anything and from any source, e.g. those who ply sordid trades, pimps and all such people, and those who lend small sums and at high rates. For all those take more than they ought and from the wrong sources,” Nichomachean Ethics, 4.1.1121b, trans. W. D. Ross in Basic Works of Aristotle, 988. Marx cites the Politics passage in his discussion of merchant’s and usurer’s capital in Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Volume 1 (Berlin: Dietz, 1974), 2.4.2, p. 179. For a review of the controversy over the ethical content of Marx’s concept of justice, see Norman Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” New Left Review 1/150 (March-April, 1985): 47-85; and Norman Geras, “Bringing Marx to Justice: An Addendum and Rejoinder,” New Left Review 1/195 (September-October 1992): 37-69. On the influence of the Aristotelian concept of justice on Marx, see most recently James Daly, “Marx and Justice,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8 (2000): 351-70. Brecht began studying Marx in 1926 and was familiar with Capital, Vol. 1, by the time he was working on the Threepenny Opera in 1928; Ronald Hayman, Brecht: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), 120. 4 There is an extensive literature on the usury prohibition. The only comprehensive survey is John T. Noonan, Jr., The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). For brief overviews, see John Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (London and Toronto: Macmillan, 1969), 62-76, with documents in translation, 155-225; and Lawrin Armstrong, “Usury,” in Joel Mokyr, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5: 183-5. The fundamental study of the canonical usury doctrine is T. P. McLaughlin, “The Teachings of the Canonists on Usury (XII, XIII and XIV Centuries),” Mediaeval Studies 1 (1939): 81-147 and 2 (1940): 1-22. Important recent studies of usury include Amleto Spicciani, Capitale e interesse tra mercatura e povertà nei teologi e canonisti dei secoli XIII-XV (Rome: Jouvence, 1990); Odd Langholm, The Aristotelian Analysis of Usury (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget,1984); and Odd Langholm, Value, Money and Usury According to the Paris Theological Tradition, 1200-1350, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 29 (Leiden: Brill, 1992). On the Protestant reformers, see most recently Eric Kerridge, Usury, Interest and the Reformation (Aldershot: Variorum, 2002). For discussions of usury in the wider context of scholastic ideas about economic ethics, see Odd Langholm, “The Medieval Schoolmen (1200-1400),” in Ancient
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a review of two texts: the Question on Usury (Questio de usura) of the Augustinian friar and theologian Gerard of Siena († c. 1336), which historians of economic thought now consider the most influential formulation of the natural law argument against usury in late medieval Europe; and the report and critique of Gerard’s quaestio by the influential fourteenth-century canonist Giovanni d’Andrea (c. 12701348) in his Quaestiones mercuriales. Before turning to the texts themselves, however, some preliminary observations on the relationship between law and ethics—or, more precisely, between law and theology—in medieval Europe are in order.5 The development of canon law as a system of positive law distinct, on the one hand, from theology and, on the other, from secular legal systems was peculiar to the medieval west.6 In the early church, ecclesiastical norms were deduced from scripture or articulated by councils of bishops; there was no autonomous discipline of canon law. In the Byzantine empire, church law was subsumed to imperial law, reflecting the union of secular and ecclesiastical authority in the emperor. In the west, however, the expansive jurisdictional claims of the popes, the rise of universities and the recovery and systematic study of Justinian’s Roman law compilations created the conditions for the birth of systematic canon law.7 With the publication of the first version of Gratian’s and Medieval Economic Ideas and Concepts of Social Justice, ed. S. Todd Lowry and Barry Gordon (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 439-501; and Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 5 Ethical and moral questions as they related to revelation were a branch of theology. “Moral theology” as the name of this discipline is an early modern usage; see Johann Theiner, Die Entwicklung der Moraltheologie zur eigenständigen Disziplin (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1970); on the medieval period, see esp. pp. 37-55. The boundaries between law and theology were not always entirely clear with respect to ethical problems; see, for example, Joseph Goering’s discussion of the post-Gratianic penitential literature in “The Internal Forum and the Literature of Penance and Confession,” Traditio 59 (2004): 175-227. 6 For a recent introduction to medieval canon law, see James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London and New York: Longman, 1995). My comments in this paragraph are also inspired by the observations of Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), 85-269; and Manlio Bellomo, The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000-1800, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Canon Law 4 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1995). 7 A recent overview of the recovery and assimilation of Roman law in medi-
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magisterial textbook, the Decretum, around 1140, canon law quickly defined itself as a discipline and a body of norms distinct from theology. The latter found its authoritative statement in Peter Lombard’s almost contemporary handbook, the Sentences, which soon became the central text of the theology curriculum.8 Canon law exercised a profound influence on the character and development of western Christianity, but the fact that the subject matter of the canons was often identical to that of theology also created certain tensions of which intellectuals were acutely conscious. Theology had little to say, for example, on the procedures for papal elections or the rules concerning benefices, but on the behavioral norms—for example, the norms governing marriage, penance or usury—moral theologians claimed a competence equal or superior to that of canonists. One example will suffice to illustrate the tension between law and theology with regard to economic questions. Henry of Susa (c. 1200-1271), best known by his sobriquet “Hostiensis,” was the most influential and creative canonist of the thirteenth century.9 In his monumental Summa on the Decretals of Gregory IX, published around 1253, Hostiensis privileged Roman eval Europe can be found in Peter Stein, Roman Law in European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 38-103. Anders Winroth, The Making of Gratian’s Decretum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) is the most important recent study of the emergence of canon law in twelfth-century Bologna and its relationship both to the revived Roman law and to theology. 8 On the successive recensions of the Decretum and dating, see Winroth, The Making, 122-45. 9 He was appointed cardinal bishop of Ostia in 1262 by Urban IV. For biographical information, see Thomas Diplovatatius, Liber de claris iuris consultis, pars posterior, ed. Fritz Schulz, Hermann Kantorowicz and Giuseppe Rabotti, Studia Gratiana 10 (1968): 141-5; Johann Friedrich von Schulte, Die Geschichte der Quellen und Literatur des canonischen Rechts, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Enke, 18751880; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1956), 2: 123-9; Charles Lefebvre, “Hostiensis,” in Raoul Naz, ed., Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1953), 5: cols. 1211-28; and Kenneth Pennington, “Henricus de Segusio (Hostiensis),” in Kenneth Pennington, Popes, Canonists and Texts, 1150-1550 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), XVI: 1-12. On the relationship between theology, Roman law and canon law in Hostiensis’ thought, see Gabriel Le Bras, “Théologie et Droit romain dans l’oeuvre d’Henri de Suse,” in Études historiques à la mémoire de Noël Didier, ed. Faculté de Droit et Sciences Économiques de Grénoble (Paris: Éditions Montchrestien, 1960), 195-204. I am grateful to Dr. Susanne Lepsius for providing me with a copy of this article.
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law concepts over ideas derived from theology in the analysis of canonical problems. He devoted extensive portions of most titles of the Summa to Roman law definitions and distinctions, noting (but generally minimizing) dissonances between Roman law on the one hand and canon law or theology on the other, and attempting to reconcile Roman law with ecclesiastical authority on points where the two were clearly at variance.10 Hostiensis’ discussion of usury, for instance, contains a veritable digest of the Roman law of usury: how it was contracted, for what reasons and at what rates of interest.11 Acknowledging that such contracts were now disallowed by virtue of the canonical prohibition, he nevertheless defended the (Christian) emperor Justinian’s approval of usury on the grounds of social necessity: “thus with respect to human law; for on account of worldly need the emperor could not entirely annul the burden of usury, although he diminished it.”12 Similarly, the Hostiensis routinely chided theologians for applying rigid and abstract standards to economic problems. Prescription was a mode of acquiring ownership through an extended period of uncontested possession. Theology and law, however, differed over the necessity of “good faith,” the prescriber’s honest belief, even if mistaken, that he was not in violation of another’s right. “But what,” Hostiensis asked, if, after prescription, [the prescriber] becomes aware that he possesses the property of another, say he learned for certain that the utensils he prescribed belonged to Martin: should he return them to Martin? The theologians say that he should ... while the masters of the canons commonly say the opposite, because according to both laws [canon and Roman] once prescription is complete he who prescribed is secure ... It seems to me that on this question the conscience of the theologians is too angelic ... Therefore, if somebody who has legitimately prescribed thinks that he sins mortally by retaining the thing prescribed, I do not consider him a theologian so much as a fraud, 10 Le Bras, “Théologie et Droit romain,” 202-3; Charles Lefebvre, “Hostiensis,” cols. 1219-20. 11 Summa aurea, X 5.19 de usuris, nn.5-7 (Venice, 1574; repr. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1963), cols. 1615-19. 12 “Hoc de iure humano. Nam propter mundi necessitatem non potuit imperator ex toto cassare obligationem usurarum, sed tamen minuit,” Summa, X 5.19 de usuris, n.7 (ed. cit., col. 1619). For a detailed discussion of juridical opinion on this point, see McLaughlin, “Teachings,” 1: 84-95.
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for he fears what is above suspicion. ... Nevertheless, if he cannot compose his conscience, he should obey it and return the thing, for otherwise he places himself at risk.13
Restitution of usury was another point on which theologians and canonists differed. Moral theology insisted that usurers make complete restitution of the sums extorted from their debtors. By contrast, Hostiensis (and most other canonists), urged discretion in exacting restitution, maintaining that if a debtor freely remitted part of the amount due to him by way of restitution, the usurer was thereby absolved. “I do not,” he insisted, write this in favour of usurers, for I owe them nothing. But neither do I want to be so unfair as to comfort the theologians and drive people to desperation and lay snares for their souls ... Therefore it should be said and maintained that, provided there was no [prior] agreement between the parties, a usurer may ask or a court order that part of the amount owed in restitution be forgiven, and I say that a usurer so forgiven is thereby absolved.14
A similar tension may be observed in Giovanni d’Andrea’s adoption and critique of Gerard of Siena’s natural law case against usury. Of
13 12 “Sed quid si iam completa praescriptione conscientiam rei alienae incipiat habere, puta audivit et pro certo quod haeres quas praescripsit erant Martini: numquid ipsas debet reddere Martino? Theologi dicunt quod sic ... Magistri canonum communiter contradicunt, quia completa praescriptione tutus est qui praescripsit secundum utrumque ius ... Mihi videtur quod in hac quaestione conscientia theologorum est nimis angelica ... igitur si quis credit peccare mortaliter retinendo rem praescriptam legitime, ipsum non theologum iudico sed fraudulosum, cum id timeat quod nulla suspicione est dignum. ... Si tamen eius conscientia ratificari non potest, reddat rem and sequatur conscientiam, nam aliter ... periculum non evadet,” Summa, X 2.26 de praescriptionibus, rubricella de praescriptione rerum immobilium, n.3 (ed. cit., col. 726). On Hostiensis’ privileging of conscience, see Le Bras, “Théologie et Droit romain,” 201; and Charles Lefebvre, “Aequitas canonica et Periculum animae dans la doctrine de l’Hostiensis,” Ephemerides iuris canonici 13 (1952): 319. 14 “Non scribo hoc in favorem usurariorum, quia nec eis astrictus sum; sed nolo a rationabili recedere ut theologis faveam et in desperatiam inducam homines, ac parem laqueum animarum ... Dicendum est igitur et tenendum quod precibus possit vel iussu iudicis sine pactione partium remissio fieri, et sic dicam talem usurarium absolutum,” Summa, X 5.19 de usuris, n.12 (ed. cit., col. 1634).
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Gerard himself we know almost nothing.15 He was, as his sobriquet suggests, a Sienese, possibly patrician by birth, who joined the Augustinian friars, probably in the first decade of the fourteenth century. After studies in Italy, perhaps in the canon law faculty of Bologna, he went to Paris, where he was admitted bachelor of the Sentences in 1325 and master of theology in 1329. His commentary on the Sentences enjoyed great authority in the fifteenth century, but for historians of economic thought it is his disputed question on usury that is of greatest interest.16 The Questio is a redaction of a public disputation Gerard presided over as a master of theology, most likely in Paris in 1329 or 1330, though possibly somewhere in Italy, where he appears to have taught in the early to mid1330s.17 The basic question Gerard posed in his disputation was this: is usury illicit because it is forbidden—that is, simply because of positive law, which is mutable, and the evidence of this is that usury is permitted in Roman but not in canon law—or is it forbidden because it is illicit by nature.18 As Gerard himself put it, is usury “by the nature of the thing itself wicked and bound up with malice;” illicit, that is to say, according to some meta-legal standard.19
15 For the scant details, see Schulte, Die Geschichte, 2: 204-5; P. Glorieux, La littérature quodlibétique, La Bibliothèque Thomiste 21, 2 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1925-1935), 2:97; and Adolar Zumkeller, “Die Augustinerschule des Mittelalters: Vertreter und Philosophisch-Theologische Lehre,” Analecta Augustiniana 27 (1964): 208-9. For additional references, see Langholm, Medieval Schools, 549. 16 Gerard’s status among fifteenth-century theologians of his order is attested by Zumkeller, “Die Augustinerschule,” 209. For an assessment of his place in the history of economic thought, see Langholm, Aristotelian Analysis, esp. 30-1 and 118-28; and Langholm, Medieval Schools, 549-60. 17 According to the cartulary of the University of Paris, Gerard presided there as a regent master in 1330 (Glorieux, La littérature, 2: 97). According to Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, cod. 625, one of the two extant copies of the Questio de usura, Gerard disputed the problem in Paris (fol. 209r). I am currently preparing an edition of the Questio de usura for the Toronto Medieval Latin Texts series based on the other surviving copy, Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 894. Quotations of the Questio are from my forthcoming edition with folio references to the Leipzig manuscript (hereafter referred to as “Leipzig”). For reasons of convenience, I provide parallel references to the more readily accessible edition of Angelo Vancio, Tractatus de usuris et de praescriptionibus (Cesena, 1630), 165-93 (hereafter “Cesena”). 18 Questio de usura, proemium; Leipzig, fols. 65r-66r; Cesena, 165-8. 19 “Talis namque actus ex natura rei contrariatur virtuti et ex natura rei ha-
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In Gerard’s view, “it is not altogether easy to assign a reason” for the latter proposition20 and the most striking feature of the Questio is its demolition or fundamental revision of all of the traditional arguments advanced against usury.21 For example, it was often argued by lawyers and theologians that usury was illicit because it involved the sale of the time that elapses from the granting of a loan until its repayment. Time, however, like air and water, is common to all and therefore non-vendible.22 Gerard considered the argument frivolous (“ista racio ... omnino videtur friuola”) because the passage of time is a factor in many legitimately profitable contracts, such as rental and lease agreements.23 Or again, it was often maintained that a charge was only permitted in loans of things that deteriorate through use, that is, rentable things, such as houses or boats. Since coins do not deteriorate in use, it is illicit to charge for a money loan.24 However, as Gerard astutely observed, bet a Deo auertere et deordinare ac per consequens ex natura rei viciosus et malicia conuolutus,” Questio de usura, proemium; Leipzig, fol. 65r; Cesena, 166. 20 “Assignare autem de hoc causam per quam euidencius demonstretur quod contractus usurarius habet ex natura rei viciositatem et maliciam conuolutam non puto omnino facile,” Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fol. 67v; Cesena, 174. 21 Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fols. 67r-68v; Cesena, 173-6. 22 Decretum Grat. D.88 c.11 palea Eiiciens condemned the usurer for selling “a thing given by God” (“ipse namque rem datam a Deo vendit”), which most theorists interpreted as time. For theological opinion, see William of Auxerre († 1229), Summa aurea, lib. 3, tractatus 48, cap. 3, q. 2, ed. Jean Ribaillier, Spicilegium Bonaventurianum, nos. 16-19, 4 vols. (Paris and Rome: Centre national de la recherche scientifique and Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1980-1986), 2: 831; and Bonaventure († 1274), Collationes de decem praeceptis, collatio 6, cap. 19, in Opera omnia (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1891), 5: 528b. The argument was adopted by Innocent IV in his analysis of credit and discount sales; Commentaria, ad X 5.19.6, n.2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1570; repr. Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1968), fol. 517va. For a discussion of the theological texts, see Langholm, Aristotelian Analysis, 111-8. 23 Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fol. 68r; Cesena, 176. Gerard took the critique from his fellow Augustinian Giles of Rome († 1316); Langhom, Aristotelian Analysis, 112. For the text, see Giles of Rome, Quolibeta, quodlibet 5, q. 24 (Louvain, 1646, repr. Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1966), 338a. 24 Canonical authority for the argument was provided by Decretum Grat. D.88 c.11 palea Eiiciens, which contrasts usury to rental: “He therefore who lets a field or a house is seen to relinquish his own use of it and to accept money and, so to speak, to exchange one profit for another. ... Thirdly, a field or a house deteriorates through use. But money, when it is lent, is neither diminished nor does it deteriorate” (“Ideo qui locat agrum vel do-
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rental charges are not really compensation for damage, since occupation of a house, for example, often improves its condition.25 A more serious objection to usury, and the one usually adopted by canonists, derived from the Roman law definition of a mutuum, that is, a loan of a fungible, a thing like grain, oil or wine, whose use involved its consumption or destruction.26 Specie—precious metal in a minted state—was considered a fungible because its use necessitated its alienation—its “consumption”—in exchange for other things. According to Roman jurists, in a loan of a fungible, ownership passed to the debtor, who was not required to repay the identical substance of the thing lent, but simply its equivalent in terms of quantity and quality. Because the debtor became the owner of the thing lent, it was unjust to charge him for the use of what had become his own property.27 Classical Roman law circumvented this purely conceptual problem by means of an additional contract termed stipulatio, by which the debtor promised an additional payment called usurae, a term which in Roman law had no negative connotations.28 However, from the eighth century onwards, the church in the west repudiated such agreements on the authority
mum, suum usum dare uidetur, et pecuniam accipere, et quodammodo quasi commutare uidetur cum lucro lucrum. ... Tertio ager vel domus utendo ueterascit. Pecunia autem fuerit mutuata, nec minuitur, nec ueterascit”). See also Bonaventure, Commentaria in quatuor libros sententiarum, lib. 3, distinctio 37, dubium 7, in Opera omnia (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1887), 3: 836a: “Alia vero ratio est, quia pecunia, dum in usum vertitur, non consumitur nec deterioratur; non sic autem est de aliis rebus, quae secundum quod magis et diutius eis utimur, magis tendunt ad defectum.” 25 “Ista racio, si quis bene considerat, est digna derisione, quia videmus quod domus illa de cuius usu accipimus pensionem vel fructum sepe melioratur per habitacionem,” Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fol. 68r; Cesena, 176. For a discussion, see Langholm, Aristotelian Analysis, 125. 26 Inst. 3.14.pr.: “Mutui autem obligatio in his rebus consistit, quae pondere numero mensurave constant, veluti vino oleo frumento pecunia numerata aere argento auro.” See also the parallel definition at Dig. 12.1.2.1. On the restriction of usury to fungibles, see Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 38-51; and McLaughlin, “Teachings,” 1: 98-102. 27 Inst. 3.14.pr. continues: “... quas res aut numerando aut metiendo aut pendendo in hoc damus, ut accipientium fiant et quandoque nobis non eaedam res, sed aliae eiusdem naturae et qualitatis reddantur. Unde etiam mutuum appellatum sit, quia ita a me tibi datur, ut ex meo tuum fiat.” See also Dig. 12.1.2.2. 28 W. W. Buckland, A Text-Book of Roman Law from Augustus to Justinian, 3rd ed., rev. Peter Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 464, n.3.
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of Lc 6.35, where Jesus commanded his followers to “grant a loan without expecting anything in return” (“mutuum date nihil inde sperantes”).29 In Gerard’s view, this argument is “exceedingly elegant and clear” but fundamentally flawed because, although ownership of the substance indeed passes to the debtor, ownership of the lent thing continues to vest in the creditor “with respect to the identity and equivalence of the value,” and it is this monetary value from which the usurer extracts his profit, not the substance of the coin or other fungible.30 The most persuasive theological argument against usury was a variation of the ownership analysis proposed by Thomas Aquinas († 1274) and known to historians of economic thought as the “consumptibility argument.”31 It goes like this: the proper use of a fungible thing is its consumption; in such things it is impossible to separate the thing and its use—as you can in the case of a rentable thing such as a house or a boat—therefore to grant the use of the thing is to grant its ownership. The usurer, however, wants to sell coin and its use separately, and he therefore sells the same thing twice or sells something that does not exist, which is clearly unjust. In Gerard’s view, the analysis is “doubtful” (dubia), or at least in need of correction, since it could be maintained that although the
29 Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity, 62-3. Lc 6.35 was cited as an anti-usury tag in the decretal Consuluit (X 5.19.10) of Urban III (1185-87). See Langholm’s observations, Aristotelian Analysis, 75. 30 “Hec autem racio, quamuis videatur valde pulchra et apparens, tamen videtur valde dubia quia licet maior proposicio sit manifesta, minor tamen videtur falsa. Cum enim dicitur quod fenerator exigit lucrum de re non sua, potest dici immediate quod est falsum, quia pecunia quam mutuat, quamuis transseat in dominium debitoris quantum ad ydemptitatem substancie, quia debitor non tenetur restituere eandem pecuniam secundum substanciam, remanet tamen dicta pecunia in dominio feneratoris quantum ad idemptitatem et equalitatem valoris. Et hoc ipsum videtur sufficere, quia ipse fenerator non exigit lucrum de pecunia quam mutuat in quantum talis substancie est, secundum quem modum ad eum non pertinet nec potest eam repetere, sed exigit magis de ea in quantum tanti valoris est, secundum quem modum ad eum pertinet, quia remanet in suo dominio, et semper potest eam licite expetere,” Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fol. 67v; Cesena, 174-5. On this point, see Langholm, Medieval Schools, 558. 31 Summa theologiae, 2a 2ae, q. 78, art. 1, in Opera omnia (Rome: S. C. de Propaganda Fide, 1897), 9: 155. For a detailed discussion, see Langholm, Aristotelian Analysis, 81-9; and Langholm, Medieval Schools, 236-44. Gerard outlines the argument at Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fols. 67v-68r; Cesena, 175-6.
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use and ownership of a fungible are indeed logically separable, in a loan they are necessarily identical, “since in the same way as [the creditor] transfers the thing itself, he also transfers its use, and vice versa, and therefore he does not separate the one from the other as the aforesaid reasoning supposes.”32 Nor, in Gerard’s opinion, does it help to cite Aristotle’s view that it is unnatural that an artificial thing like a coin should give birth to another coin, since natural things such as wine and oil can also be the subject of usurious loans. Furthermore, artificial things such as houses legitimately “give birth” or produce profit in the form of rent.33 Thus it might be said that “a house gives birth to a house” when a landlord uses his profits to buy another house with a view to letting it out.34 Gerard’s correction of both Thomas and the canonists, characterized by Langholm as a theory of the “self-valuation of fungibles,” is very elegant.35 He began with the Roman law definition of a fungible as something that can be “counted, measured or weighed.”36 Fungibles—artificial (for example, specie) as well as natural (for example, wine or oil)—he argues, derive from their measure, weight or number a fixed and determinate value that remains unchanged provided the measure, weight or number remains constant. If such things appear to increase or decrease in value, it is not because of any change in their intrinsic value expressed in 32 “Ista eciam racio videtur dubia quia posset aliquis dicere quod fenerator non vendit usum rei quam mutuat sine ipsa re, immo simul vendit utrumque, quia alienat a se non solum usum rei sed eciam ipsam rem quantum ad substanciam et ideo quantum ad hoc idem iudicium videtur de utroque, quia eo modo quo transfert ipsam rem, transfert et ipsum usum et econverso, quapropter non separat unum a reliquo sicud supposuit dicta racio,” Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fol. 68r; Cesena, 176. Langholm discusses the argument in Aristotelian Analysis, 89-90. 33 For Aristotle, see above, n.3. 34 “Sed nec ista racio videtur valere propter duo. Primo quia usura committitur non solum in artificialibus sed eciam in naturalibus, utpote in vino et oleo et similibus, et per consequens dicta racio non potest applicari tantum ad illa. Secundo quia videmus quod domus est quoddam artificiale et tamen usque ad certum tempus potest quis per unam domum lucrari aliam domum equiualentem, et sic domus pareret domum,” Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fol. 68r; Cesena, 176. 35 The description is at Langholm, Medieval Schools, 557. Gerard’s argument is contained in Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fols. 68r-70r; Cesena, 176-82. For a more complete discussion than that offered here, see Langholm, Aristotelian Analysis, 118-28; and Langholm, Medieval Schools, 555-60. 36 See above, n.26.
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terms of number, weight or measure, but because of a fluctuation in the value of the things for which they may be exchanged.37 Thus, a bushel of wheat is always worth a bushel of wheat of the same quality, but in terms of another substance, say, goats or coin, it may, for example for reasons of scarcity, be worth more in February than in September. Natural and artificial nonfungibles—for example, vineyards, houses or horses—derive their value from external and contingent variables, such as time, condition and place.38 For this reason they are not comparable to one another and cannot be the subject of a loan (mutuum). Contingent variables, by contrast, do not affect the value of fungibles: in terms of number, weight and measure, a fungible is never worth more than itself; a bushel of wheat is always worth a bushel of wheat of the same quality, not a bushel and a half; ten florins are always worth ten florins, not twelve. By demanding more than the amount lent, the usurer therefore violates the intrinsic—the natural—value of a fungible determined and fixed by its nature or art in terms of number, measure or weight. Gerard maintained that this analysis also provides a correction to the canonistic argument from ownership.39 Because fungibles have a naturally determinate value in terms of number, measure and weight, they are necessarily sterile: 37
“Idcirco ab intrinsico sue nature potest certitudinaliter cognosci eorum valor, nec augentur nec minuuntur in suo valore quamdiu non distrahuntur in suo pondere. Et si videantur augeri vel minui, hoc non est propter aliquod augmentum vel minucionem valoris qui sit in eis sed per augmentum et minucionem nostre indigencie siue eciam propter augmentum vel minucionem in alijs rebus in quas commutantur. Et sicud de rebus que consueuerunt ponderari, in suo modo sic dico de alijs rebus que consueuerunt mensurari, sicut vinum, granum, oleum et consimilia,” Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fols. 68r-v; Cesena, 177. 38 “Hoc autem ... non potest dici de rebus alijs naturalibus, quecumque sint ille, nam alie res naturales non se habent in sua natura ad unum aliquod determinate, ex quo possit earum valor pensari et certitudinaliter cognosci; immo est impossibile certitudinaliter cognoscere aliarum valorem, quia earum valor non potest pensari aliquo intrinseco ex necessitate sed ex diuersis causis extrinsecis et contingentibus, ut verbi gratia, valor istius vinee vel valor istius agri quandoque pensatur ex loco, quandoque ex tempore, quandoque ex condicionibus personarum, quandoque ex diuersis alijs circumstantijs que possunt multipliciter variari. Et sicud dico in vinea vel in agro, ita et in quibuscumque alijs rebus naturalibus que non ponderantur vel mensurantur,” Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fol. 68v; Cesena, 177-8. 39 See Langholm, Medieval Schools, 558-9.
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That a usurious contract causes a thing that does not generate fruit to generate a profit is clear because it is assumed in the foregoing argument that lendable things, in which usury is committed, have assigned to them by nature or art a determinate value, and as a result cannot increase in value and for the same reason cannot bear fruit, for a thing that bears fruit always increases in value along with the fruit, for it is of greater value when it is in fruit than when it is not.40
Therefore, although ownership of the value of the sum lent indeed vests in the creditor (only ownership of the substance passes to the debtor), to demand an increment in the form of interest represents a violation of the intrinsically sterile nature of a fungible. Gerard’s quaestio survives in only two manuscript copies, and the reason for this is that his argument was paraphrased by Giovanni d’Andrea in a quaestio disputata of his own linked to a fragment of the title de regulis iuris in the Liber sextus that suggested the topic of usury: “Sin is not forgiven unless the thing stolen is restored.”41 Giovanni redacted the quaestio sometime between 1329-1330 and his death in the first visitation of the Black Death. In contrast to Gerard, we know a great deal about Giovanni.42 Born in Florentine 40
“Quod autem contractus usurarius faciat rem non generantem fructum generare lucrum apparet quia presupponitur in precedenti processu quod res mutuabiles, in quibus usura committitur, habeant a natura vel ab arte sibi prestitutum determinatum valorem et per consequens non possunt in eo crescere et ex hoc ipso non possunt fructum generare, quia res que generat fructum semper excrescit in valore cum fructu, nam maioris valoris est quando est sub fructu quam quando est sine fructu,” Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fol. 69r; Cesena, 179. 41 VI de reg. iur. 4: “Peccatum non dimittitur, nisi restituatur ablatum.” For the text of the quaestio, see Johannes Andreae, In titulum de regulis iuris novella commentaria (Venice, 1581; repr. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1963), 62ra-66ra. The “commentary” is in fact a collection of questions Giovanni disputed on Wednesday afternoons during term and therefore known as the Quaestiones mercuriales. Giovanni subsequently arranged them according to the chapters of de regulis iuris. On the collection, see Cyprian Rosen, “Notes on an Earlier Version of the Quaestiones Mercuriales,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, n.s. 5 (1975): 103-14; and O. Condorelli, “Dalle Quaestiones Mercuriales alla Novella in titulum de regulis iuris,” Revista internazionale di diritto comune 3 (1992): 125-71. 42 For biographical information, see Diplovatatius, Liber de claris iuris consultis, 229-39; Schulte, Die Geschichte, 2: 205-29; S. Stelling-Michaud, “Jean d’André,” in Naz, Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique, 6: cols. 89-92; Stephan Kuttner, “Johannes Andreae and his Novella on the Decretals of Gregory IX:
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Tuscany around 1270 and educated in Bologna, he was the most celebrated canonist of his day. A counsellor of popes, friend of Petrarch and professor of canon law at Bologna, he left influential commentaries on the entire corpus of canon law and was posthumously dubbed “the fount and trumpet of canon law” by the civilian Baldus degli Ubaldi († 1400).43 Giovanni’s enormous prestige meant that Gerard’s argument came to be associated with the more famous canonist; indeed, as recently as 1957, John T. Noonan described it as the “Andrean argument” against usury.44 It was the distinguished Norwegian economic historian Odd Langholm who corrected the attribution and established the importance of Gerard’s analysis for late medieval economic thought.45 Giovanni endorsed Gerard’s analysis, reproducing the Questio de usura almost verbatim, confining himself on the whole to inserting additional juristic allegations in support of Gerard’s points and to correcting inaccurate formulations of legal concepts.46 Most subseAn Introduction,” The Jurist 24 (1964): 393-408; repr. in Stephan Kuttner, Studies in the History of Medieval Canon Law (Aldershot: Variorum, 1990), xvi. There exists as yet no systematic study of the life and thought of this important jurist. 43 “Iuris canonici fons et tuba”; quoted by Kuttner, “Johannes Andreae,” 399, n.24. 44 Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 67. 45 Langholm, Aristotelian Analysis, 30-1; Langholm, Medieval Schools, 550, 556-7. The history of Gerard’s economic writings is additionally confused by the fact that the manuscript tradition sometimes also credited him with authorship of Pietro di Giovanni Olivi’s († 1298) treatises on usury and restitution; see Dionisio Pacetti, “Un trattato sulle usure e le restituzioni di Pietro Giovanni Olivi falsamente attribuito a Fr. Gerardo da Siena,” Archivum franciscanum historicum 46 (1953): 448-57. These texts have been edited by Giacomo Todeschini, Un trattato di economia politica francescana: il “De emptionibus et venditionibus, de usuris, de restitutionibus” di Pietro di Giovanni Olivi, Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, Studi storici, fasc. 125-6 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1980). 46 For example, Giovanni objected to Gerard’s use of the term “owner” (dominus) to describe the creditor: he owns neither the substance nor the value of the principal, but rather has an action for recovery of the sum lent: “Tu dic quod non bene advertit hic disputans, quia si debitor haberet unum scrinium nummorum, non est dare quod creditor unus ex illis sit dominus; habet autem principalem actionem contra debitorem,” Novella, ad VI de reg. iur. 4, Peccatum, n.11 (ed. cit. fol. 63rb). Similarly, Gerard incorrectly characterizes commodatum, the gratuitous loan of a non-fungible thing, as a profitable contract: see Questio de usura, art. 2; Leipzig, fol. 68v; Cesena, 175; and Giovanni’s comment, Novella, ad VI de reg. iur. 4, Peccatum, n.11 (ed. cit. fol. 63rb).
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quent canonistic authorities on usury, such as Giovanni Calderini († 1365) and Lorenzo Ridolfi († 1443), followed suit: indeed, the latter described Gerard’s argument as both “useful and elegant.”47 Nevertheless, Giovanni—and later canonists echo him on this point—had an important reservation about the argument as it stood. While agreeing that the valuation of fungibles in terms of number, weight and measure was a convenience, Giovanni declared that he did not understand why Gerard insisted that fungibles have a fixed and determinate value in such terms by nature: I would readily concede that the valuation of fungibles is simpler, especially when concluding a contract, by restricting it to [a fixed and determinate measure], but I do not understand why fungibles should have an inalterable fixed and determinate value beforehand provided the weight, number or measure remains constant.48
Langholm suggests that Giovanni misunderstood or simply rejected the argument.49 But the text of Giovanni’s quaestio indicates that he did not understand Gerard to be arguing that the value of fungibles cannot fluctuate in terms of other commodities; that is, he did not misunderstand the argument.50 Nor, clearly, did he reject the argument in general. Giovanni seems to have objected to the proposition that the categories of number, weight and measure derive from the nature of fungibles; and this appears to be the burden of the qualifying “antea” (“beforehand”) in his comment. As applied
47
“Sed quia hoc [that is, that usury is naturally vicious] utile et pulchrum videre est, paulisper in eo euagemur,” Tractatus de usuris, pars 1, q.7, ed. Lawrin Armstrong, Usury and Public Debt in Early Renaissance Florence: Lorenzo Ridolfi on the ‘Monte Comune,’ Texts and Studies 144 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2003), 144. Giovanni Calderini refers his readers to Giovanni d’Andrea’s quaestio in a repetitio on X 5.19.19 Naviganti; see Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 2652, fols. 283v-284r. 48 “Ego de plano concederem quod facilior est harum aestimatio et maxime tempore quo contrahitur restringendo ad illud, sed quod antea habeant certum et determinatum valorem durante pondere, numero vel mensura, non alternandum in plus vel minus, non capio,” Novella, ad VI de reg. iur. 4, Peccatum, n.13 (ed. cit., fol. 63vb). 49 Langholm, Medieval Schools, 557. 50 See the passage immediately preceding that just quoted, which reproduces Gerard’s observation about the price of fungibles in terms of other things (see above, n.37); Novella, ad VI de reg. iur. 4, Peccatum, n.13 (ed. cit., fol. 63vb).
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to fungibles, number, weight and measure are conventional constructs that have significance only in a contractual context and more specifically in the context of a loan. The value of a fungible is fixed by the contract—not by nature—and once the agreement has been concluded, the value cannot fluctuate with respect to number, measure and weight. With this caveat, the remainder of Gerard’s argument holds good. What does this appropriation and correction of a theologian’s argument by a jurist tell us about the relationship between law and ethics in the later Middle Ages? In a certain sense, Giovanni’s critique went to the heart of Gerard’s question and transformed the terms of the debate. Gerard’s objective was to reformulate the Thomistic consumptibility argument in a form that rendered it unassailable by resolving an inconsistency that derived in part from Thomas’ over-faithful adherence to Aristotle’s remarks about artificial fungibles. He appealed to the supra-conventional and metalegal standard of nature as the ground for distinguishing between fungibles and non-fungibles. Unfortunately, the only definition of a fungible to which he had access was one that itself derived from law and convention. It is precisely this point that Giovanni singled out, insisting on the conventional character of the definition. For Giovanni, there is nothing natural about number, measure and weight: they are conventions agreed upon by human society. In short, they are the product of positive law, which is the realm of canon law, whose function, as Gerard himself asserts, is to direct human society towards the common good “in accordance with faith in God and in expectation of the future life.”51 Gerard of Siena’s sweeping critique of usury was very much in the spirit of the times, which witnessed an intensification of the usury prohibition. In 1317 John XXII promulgated a decree of the Council of Vienne (1311-1312) which increased the penalties for notorious usurers and imposed excommunication on public authorities who tolerated their activities.52 It would be a mistake to con51 “Ius vero canonicum intendit dirigere in bonum commune secundum quod congruit humane societati, que non solum viuit ciuiliter sed eciam regulariter secundum fidem in Deum tendendo et vitam aliam expectando,” Questio de usura, art. 5; Leipzig, fols. 71v-72r; Cesena, 190. 52 The decree Ex gravi (Clem. 5.5.1) condemned the legitimation of usury as quasi-heretical and forbade the public licencing of usurers. For a translation, see John W. Boyer and Julius Kirshner, eds., University of Chicago
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clude from Giovanni d’Andrea’s reservations about Gerard’s argument that lawyers were somehow more accommodating of usury than their theological colleagues. On the contrary, Giovanni d’Andrea was among the most severe critics of the so-called “extrinsic titles” to usury, most notably the title first proposed by Hostiensis according to which a merchant might claim compensation for legitimate opportunities to profit that he renounced by making a loan, namely, lucrum cessans (cessant gain), what modern economists call “opportunity cost”.53 In Giovanni’s view lucrum cessans “furnishes a highway to usury” and should therefore be rejected.54 Late medieval and Renaissance canonists were not, as the literature sometimes suggests, more “business-friendly” than theologians; indeed, most accepted Giovanni’s judgement on cessant gain and his endorsement of Gerard’s natural law argument against usury.55 The relationship between canon law and ethics in late medieval Europe is a subject that merits further study. Although the two disciplines were clearly in accord about behavioral norms, the existing scholarship on medieval economic ethics, particularly on the usury prohibition, and this (admittedly narrow) case study suggest
Readings in Western Civilization, vol. 4, Medieval Europe, ed. and trans. Julius Kirshner and Karl F. Morrison (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 317. Gerard does not cite the decree in his quaestio. On the penalties for usury, see McLaughlin, “Teachings,” 2: 1-22. 53 For discussions, see McLaughlin, “Teachings,” 1: 144-7; Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, 115-28; and Spicciani, Capitale e interesse, 27-48. 54 “Quid si habens pecuniam volebat ad nundinas ire et merces emere, ut alio deferret vel tempore servaret propter lucrum; ego indigens pecunia illam recipio, offerens me illam restituere cum lucro sperato in termino et loco? Dicit hic Innocentius quod licet quidam contrarium teneant, ipse putat hunc contractum usurarium, nec scit illum excusare. Hostiensis ... dicit quod tali mercatori obligatus sum ad interesse illius lucri, quod facturus erat verisimiliter ex pecunia, dummodo nil fiat in fraudem usurarum et dictus mercator dicto modo non consueverit pecuniam tradere ad usuram. Verius videtur dictum Innocentii et quod dicitur de interesse, illud locum habet post moram debitoris, et ex contrario pararetur aperta via ad foenus, staret enim usurarius paratus cum capello, ocreis et calcaribus ad modum Foroiuliensium, dicens se ad nundinas ire velle, si sibi liceret taliter stipulari sub colore lucri speranti aliquid ultra sortem,” Novella, ad X 5.19.19, n.5 (ed. cit., fol. 77vb). 55 For a critique of some of the assumptions underlying the historiography, see Lawrin Armstrong, “Usury, Conscience and Public Debt: Angelo Corbinelli’s Testament of 1419,” in John A. Marino and Thomas Kuehn, eds., A Renaissance of Conflicts: Visions and Revisions of Law and Society in Italy and Spain (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 173-240.
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that a fruitful area of research will prove to be the relationship between—and relative weight assigned by law and theology to— nature and convention.
MAX WEBER AND USURY: IMPLICATIONS FOR HISTORICAL RESEARCH1 Lutz Kaelber
Introduction Scholarly interest in usury varies widely across the disciplines. While medieval historians and economists continue to debate what if any effect the Catholic church’s ban on taking interest on loans had on economic development, sociologists have abandoned the topic. Only Benjamin Nelson has afforded it a detailed analysis.2 Nelson reconstructs the history of religious attitudes toward usury in the Western world using the Weberian theme of a transformation from an ethic of “tribal brotherhood,” or charity among kin, to one of “universal otherhood,” reflective of the dominance of purposive rationality in social relations. Relating his studies to Max Weber, he notes that Weber had analyzed provisions against usury in a variety of settings and contexts, including while being a student of commercial law and history under the auspices of the acclaimed authority in the field, Levin Goldschmidt.3 Yet Nelson provides no substantive discussion of Weber’s more intricate viewpoints, perhaps due to the fact, as he writes in the prologue to the second edition, that his book had been fully formed before he came across Weber’s writings.4 Since then few sociologists have acknowledged that Weber included references to the prohibition of contracting any increment above the principal of a loan in medieval Catholicism and in other
1
An earlier version of this paper was published under the title “Max Weber on Usury and Medieval Capitalism: From The History of Commercial Partnerships to The Protestant Ethic,” in Max Weber Studies 4 (2004): 51-75; reproduced here with permission of the journal. I would like to thank Nick Danigelis, Lawrin Armstrong, John Munro, the anonymous reviewers for Max Weber Studies, and Sam Whimster for their comments and suggestions. 2 Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). 3 Nelson, The Idea, 235. 4 Nelson, The Idea, xi.
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religions, and even fewer describe and analyze what these references entail and what they mean.5 This paper addresses the development of Weber’s views on usury. Fragmented and strewn, in bits and pieces, over a variety of his writings, these views nevertheless provide important insights. Usury was not a peripheral topic in Weber’s writings. The topic emerged in Weber’s dissertation and gradually came to constitute a part of Weber’s inquiries into the salvation economy of medieval Christianity. Moreover, Weber’s writings on the topic contain insights pertinent to recent scholarship. The content of Weber’s thought is discussed in three sections. The first section explores the emergence of Weber’s views in the context of his dissertation and first book, which contains his most extensive discussion of the medieval prohibition of usury and its effects on economic development. It also addresses similarities and differences between Weber’s views and those held by contemporary scholars, many of whom saw the emergence of certain economic institutions such as commercial partnerships as a means of evading the Church’s ban—an argument Weber refuted. The second section addresses usury in the context of Weber’s Protestant Ethic essay published in 1904-1905 and subsequent rebuttals of his critics. Here, Weber drew on his new explorations of the relationship between religion and the economy as well as his earlier studies on the German stock exchange to argue a point that was consistent with, but not identical to, his earlier approach. Drawing parallels between medieval guild members and modern stockbrokers, who found innovative ways to cope with the moral regulation of economic affairs and ultimately render them ineffective, Weber questioned the validity of Werner Sombart’s materialist interpretation of the role of ethics in economic development. Had religion been merely the reflection of material conditions in the transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy, Weber argued, religious
5
See Wolfgang Schluchter, Paradoxes of Modernity, trans. N. Solomon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 226-7, 343 n.247, who notes that Weber considered the ban on usury a part of the traditionalist ethic of the pre-Reformation church that inhibited the emergence of modernity but does not explore the context of Weber’s argument and why Weber thought this to have been the case, and Richard Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 258 n.15, who acknowledges that Weber “discusses usury quite a bit” without further analysis.
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authorities would not have expressed heightened concern regarding usury in times of economic expansion. The third section addresses Weber’s views on usury as they derived from his comparative studies on the world religions and Economy and Society. Weber compared different religions’ usury provisions and demonstrated that their stringency did not correlate with economic development. Rejecting new claims by Sombart and others that the medieval Catholic church’s ban on taking interest on loans was a boon rather than a bane for investing assets, Weber thematized the development of markets and the development of usury prohibitions as countervailing rationalizations of the religious sphere and the sphere of the economy. While a discussion of the merit of Weber’s argument is beyond the purview of this paper, the conclusion endeavors some thoughts on how Weber’s views may inform current scholarly debates concerning the historical role of the religious prohibition of interest on loans in Western history.
The Role of Usury in Economic Development and the Relative Autonomy of Law and the Economy: Weber’s Dissertation Weber discussed usury as early as in his first book. Published in 1889 and based on his dissertation, it contains a legal analysis of medieval partnerships.6 In a little-known and heretofore never discussed section, Weber explores the topic to a greater extent than in any other writing and establishes the framework for later analyses. In The History of Commercial Partnerships, Weber responds to the argument that medieval partnerships were founded to circumvent canon law’s prohibition of usury, which secular statutes adopted as well. He notes: Endemann argued that even loans that represented, from an economic point of view, a loan of capital in return for the payment of 6 Max Weber, Zur Geschichte der Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Enke, 1889); Max Weber, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages, trans. L. Kaelber (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); see also L. Kaelber, “Max Weber’s Dissertation,” History of the Human Sciences 16 (2003): 27-56.
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fixed interest were constructed in the form of a partnership. We know of similar attempts to construct the purchase of perpetual rent as a hidden interest-bearing loan secured by a mortgage, but this view has been abandoned. The analyses by Arnold and others have shown that the purchase of perpetual rent developed gradually out of renting real estate in towns, and that it fulfilled independent economic needs and not at all acted as a stopgap for the missing interest-bearing loan. This holds true even when capital available for investment later employed this institution—but not before it had come to fruition independently—as a substitute for the non-existent interest-bearing mortgage loan ... While we have also seen that the commenda and the societas maris were indeed used as forms of investment, even for the property of wards, according to the statutes of Pisa, at that time these partnerships had already developed into their most advanced form in the Middle Ages. Therefore, it is a vast exaggeration to assume that capital invested in such a way had chosen this form of investment because there was no way for it to be invested in the form of an interest-bearing loan. There is no evidence for that; in fact, there is evidence of the contrary ... In the case in which a maritime venture experienced a catastrophic loss, the repayment of a loan taken out for the purpose of funding the venture had to appear highly questionable. This explains ... why the investment of capital took on the form of a share of the risk in exchange for a share of the profit, the latter of which nascent commerce, in need of capital, supplied willingly ... This institution corresponded to views prevalent in Mediterranean trade, the oldest area of large trade, which could not perceive of the investment of capital for the purpose of an expedition overseas in any other terms than as a participation in it—that is, as sharing its risk as well. Changes in these views reflect the fact that risk became more calculable. This, rather than a subtle attempt to circumvent the prohibition of usury, explains why part of the risk was assumed by capitalists. It also explains why forms of partnerships that economically resembled a loan still appear to have legally been constructed as partnerships with a fixed dividend. When the doctrine of usury—if one can agree that such existed— appeared on the economic scene, the development of the forms of partnership, as Lastig has strongly argued against Endemann, had long been concluded. The role played by the canonical prohibition was therefore not a small one, in Italy as well as in other places. Almost all statutes addressed it ... But one cannot argue that the development of a new institution of law, or merely the further development of an existing institution, happened due to this prohibition. The prohibition led to the end of some institutions such as the dare
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ad proficuum maris; and otherwise, it also served a restrictive, not creative, function. Even the proficuum maris, which corresponds most poorly to the institution of a partnership but seems best suitable as a paradigm of Endemann’s theory, appears to have been fully developed before the doctrine of usury took hold, and it later fell victim to this doctrine once it had fully taken hold. Its demise was not due to the way in which risk was distributed but happened because of the certum lucrum. These facts show clearly that the prohibition of usury did not give rise to the form of partnership.7
Weber makes four important arguments here, some of which are buried in obscure language and references. First, he does not advocate that usury laws were without impact. Weber distinguishes between loans for consumption and loans for investment purposes. For the former the prohibition of interest was indeed a constraining factor, whereas for the latter it led to the decline of the dare ad proficuum maris, which was based on a capitalist’s willingness (literally) “to give for making profit on maritime voyages.” That form of partnership developed in the later Middle Ages, when diminishing risks on commercial voyages to sea ports in the Mediterranean allowed for the calculation of an average profit, a share in which could then be reasonably guaranteed.8 While this arrangement took out the risk for the capitalist, who merely contributed his capital without further involvement and relied on a fixed dividend or rate of return (certum lucrum), it also made the partnership vulnerable to the accusation of usury and led to its ultimate demise, as Weber shows for the city of Pisa. The prohibition of usury was therefore not entirely without teeth. Weber’s second argument relates to the investment of capital in other, more common types of partnerships, both on land and at sea. The usury ban’s effect on those partnerships, he argues, was very limited. Investment loans were more important for economic development than consumption loans, and in the various forms of partnerships capital found ready investment opportunities. Since in 7 In this and other passages taken from English translations of Weber’s writings, I have made corrections or retranslated parts of them. Weber, Zur Geschichte, 111-4; Weber, The History, 137-9. 8 Weber, Zur Geschichte, 109-10; Weber, The History, 136-7. Its equivalent on land was the “dare ad proficuum de terra in bottega vel alio loco,” where an investor invested in a company operating out of a shop. See Weber, Zur Geschichte, 122; Weber, The History, 145.
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most medieval partnerships a partner who provided capital incurred the risk of losing it and sometimes involved himself in carrying on business, he could legitimately reap a profit. Such a profit was seen as entirely different from taking interest on a loan, which, with certain exceptions, was prohibited. Hence, the prohibition of usury simply did not apply to most of the commercial associations Weber explored. The third argument concerns the timing of the emergence of stricter usury laws and the legal development of partnerships in the later Middle Ages. In 1874 and 1883, the legal scholar Wilhelm Endemann had published a massive two-volume study on the economic doctrines in Roman canon law. It was not the first study that addressed usury, but compared to studies by Catholic theologians and authors such as Franz Xaver Funk’s,9 it focused more on usury laws’ legal construction, practical effects, and economic relevance than on their ethical aspects. Endemann’s tome was considered the major study of this sort at the time, but while Weber acknowledges Endemann’s contributions (as well as Funk’s),10 he takes issue with Endemann’s contention that medieval partnerships developed mainly as a means of circumventing increasingly stringent usury laws. In doing so, Weber relies in part on the findings of a certain “Arnold,” whom he mentions in the quoted passage, which is a reference to the scholar of Roman and German history Wilhelm Arnold. Arnold’s major study on the development of real property in German cities included census contracts (an annuity or perpetual rent), which did not emerge as a response to the prohibition of
9 Franz Xaver Funk, Zins und Wucher: Eine moraltheologische Abhandlung mit Berüchsichtigung des gegenwärtigen Standes der Kultur und der Staatswissenschaften (Tübingen: Laupp’sche Buchhandlung, 1868). 10 Weber’s History of Commercial Partnerships and his Grundriss zu den Vorlesungen über Allgemeine (“Theoretische”) Nationalökonomie (Outline to the Lectures on General [“Theoretical”] National Economy) of 1898 mention Endemann on several occasions (Max Weber, Grundriss zu den Vorlesungen über Allgemeine (“Theoretische”) Nationalökonomie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1990), 12, 16, 17). In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of 1919-1920, Weber refers once more to Funk (whose name he misspells) and to Endemann’s studies that, according to him, “[are] today out of date in regard to detail yet still remain fundamental” (Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988), 57 n.; M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 3d ed., trans. S. Kalberg (Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2001), 176 n.32).
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usury.11 Yet Weber’s main argument derives to a much larger extent from his own studies, and those of the scholar of law Gustav Lastig, on medieval partnerships. In a pioneering analysis of documents in Italian archives, Lastig12 had launched an attack on Endemann’s thesis for not sufficiently distinguishing between different types of partnerships and misrepresenting how capital was invested in them. Weber supports many of Lastig’s views but he also goes beyond the latter’s studies by showing that changes in the legal arrangements of medieval commercial partnerships made them increasingly less similar to an interest-bearing loan or other such types of investments at the same time as the usury doctrine stiffened. Of the two main forms of commendas he studied, the unilateral and the bilateral commenda, Weber considers the first one to be historically older. In that arrangement, a capitalist provided capital to an enterprise in which a managing partner carried out the business transactions. The managing partner did not partake in the risk and gradually developed into the capitalist’s agent, buying and selling goods in his own name on the account of the principal. Weber argues that the unilateral commenda is therefore the medieval precursor to the modern form of commission agency. In the Constitutum usus, Pisa’s codified commercial customs dating back to as early as c. 1146-1154,13 this form of partnership was known as dare ad portandum in compagniam. It lacks a separate fund, which is a constitutive element of the bilateral partnership, for an investor contributes capital but is not made liable to third parties by his partners’ actions. The risk is thus limited to the investor’s contribution, and his involvement in the partnership is not transparent to third parties.14 In a bilateral partnership, on the other hand, a se11 W. Arnold, Zur Geschichte des Eigentums in den deutschen Städten (Basel: Georg, 1861), 92. For a supportive assessment, see H.-J. Gilomen, “Rente, Rentenkauf, Rentenmarkt,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters (Munich: LexMa, 1995), 7: 736. 12 G. Lastig, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Handelsrechts, I,” Zeitschrift für das Gesamte Handelsrecht 23 (1878): 138-78; G. Lastig, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Handelsrechts, II,” Zeitschrift für das Gesamte Handelsrecht 24 (1879): 387-449. 13 P. Classen, “Kodifikation im 12. Jahrhundert: Die Constituta usus et legis von Pisa,” in P. Classen, ed., Recht und Schrift im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1977), 311-7. 14 As Weber points out, the equivalent in modern German commercial law is the “dormant partnership” (Stille Gesellschaft). This institution of European
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dentary investor as well as a traveling partner each contribute capital and share the profits or losses. From a legal perspective the partnership’s capital is separate from the investors’ personal assets, and partnership business is undertaken in a joint name, that of the firm. In the societas maris referred to in the Constitutum usus, the sedentary partner’s legal liability is limited to his capital contribution, whereas the traveling partner’s liability is unlimited; hence, Weber argues, the modern limited partnership had its root in the Pisan societas maris.15 Time is important in this analysis, for the shift away from unilateral partnerships and toward bilateral ones as a preferred form of investment was well underway before elaborations of canonical usury prohibitions began in the late twelfth century. This finding not only undercuts the argument that religious prohibitions affected these economic changes but also explains why Weber holds that, when the doctrine of usury got its teeth, “the development of the forms of partnership ... had long been concluded.” The fourth argument contained in the passage is implicit but nevertheless important. His viewpoint is based on the supposition that both law and the economy in the Middle Ages had sufficient societal autonomy to proceed along their own trajectories and that developments in either sphere could simply be adduced by reference to another social sphere such as religion. While interdependencies are always empirically observable, their existence does not allow for the conclusion that one sphere depends on another or merely mirrors developments in the other. Thus, Weber sees a differentiation of institutional spheres before modernity, and with regard to the concomitant increase in the spheres’ relative autonomy, he follows his academic teacher, the legendary scholar of commercial law Levin Goldschmidt, who stressed such autonomy throughout his writings. Goldschmidt also agreed substantively with
civil law does not have an exact equivalent in common law countries, including those who stand in the Anglo-American legal tradition, where undisclosed or “silent” partners have unlimited personal liability in the absence of a limited partnership agreement. See Weber, Zur Geschichte, 108; Weber, The History, 135. 15 Weber also traces the modern general partnership, which has joint and several liability, to partnerships in Florence, derivative of associations of craftsmen and domestic traders, see L. Kaelber, “Max Weber’s Dissertation in the Context of His Early Life and Career,” in Weber, The History, 22-7.
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Weber’s position. Rejecting Endemann, Goldschmidt stated that the prohibition of usury was not effective in throttling economic development, for even canon law had provisions that permitted the taking of interest, not to mention more lenient secular laws. At most usury laws introduced additional restrictions to the market for credit, thus increasing rather than decreasing interest rates.16 Correspondingly, Weber17 notes in the concluding chapter that the prohibition of usury “was more unsettling to theoreticians than to practitioners.”18 Weber was thus first exposed to the issue of the prohibition of usury and its effects on economic development in his studies of the medieval urban Italian economy, which he approached as a legal scholar. His arguments concerning the limited effect of religious restrictions on interest in Europe’s most advanced economy, based on his own documentary analyses, and law’s and the economy’s relatively high degree of autonomy would affect his views when he revisited the topic as part of his Protestant Ethic studies fifteen years later. Usury and Medieval Religion: The “Protestant Ethic” Essays and Weber’s Rebuttals of Rachfahl After finishing his dissertation, Weber quickly moved on to other topics. He would not address the issue of usury in detail again until his two-part essay “The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capital16
L. Goldschmidt, Universalgeschichte des Handelsrechts (Stuttgart: Enke, 1891), 140-1. 17 Weber, Zur Geschichte, 151; Weber, The History, 170. 18 It seems impossible to determine who influenced whom. Presumably relying on Weber’s Italian case studies, Goldschmidt made his first extensive comments on the topic in 1891. However, it is likely that he had long before formed an opinion, which he may have expressed to Weber during the latter’s preparation of his dissertation. The agreement between the two scholars extended beyond usury. Despite Weber’s vociferous remarks toward the Poles in his Freiburg inaugural address (see, e.g., J. M. Barbalet, “Weber’s Inaugural Lecture and Its Place in His Sociology,” Journal of Classical Sociology 1 (2001): 147-70), they had similar views on German politics and economic policy at the time. Both were supportive of national liberalism and favored a limited intervention of the state in the economy. See K. Borchardt, “Max Weber’s Writings on the Bourse: Puzzling Out a Forgotten Corpus,” Max Weber Studies 2 (2002): 139-62; L. Weyhe, Levin Goldschmidt: Ein Gelehrtenleben in Deutschland (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996).
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ism” in 1904-1905 and replies to his critic Felix Rachfahl in 1910. In his Protestant Ethic essay, Weber’s approach broadens. He is now concerned with the practical aspects of religious ethics, specifically with the ways in which religion inhibited or contributed to the emergence of a modern capitalist ethos represented in modern vocational culture, for which he adopts Werner Sombart’s term: the “spirit” of capitalism. Weber portrays the Middle Ages as a time before the modern notion of a calling (Beruf) broke the Church’s “mold of medieval economic regulation.” This mold he describes as follows: The phrase “Deo placere non potest” was used in relation to the activity of the merchant. But, when compared to widely held antichrematistic views, this represented a considerable accommodation of Catholic doctrine to the interests of the financial powers of the Italian cities ... [G]ain as an activity pursued as an end in itself was basically a “pudendum,” which was tolerated solely because it had become an established institution. A “moral” view like that of Benjamin Franklin would have been simply unthinkable. This was also the position of those directly concerned. Their life’s work was, at best, something morally neutral—tolerated, but on account of the constant danger of clashing with the Church’s ban on usury, spiritually dubious. The sources reveal that upon the death of wealthy people, considerable sums of money flowed into the coffers of the Church institutions as “conscience money,” some of it even going back to former debtors as “usura” wrongfully taken from them. Even skeptical persons not in sympathy with the Church tended to play safe and pay these sums in order to be reconciled with the Church just in case the worst came to the worst. It was an insurance against the uncertainties concerning the afterlife and because, after all (at least this rather lax view was widely held), outward conformity to the laws of the Church was sufficient to salvation. It is here that the amoral and in part immoral character of their actions becomes clear, as those concerned themselves saw it.19
Weber sees heterodox religion in the Middle Ages as accommodating, rather than being hostile to, economic activities in general, and
19 M. Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus, I: Das Problem,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 20 (1904): 32-3; M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. and trans. P. Baehr and G. C. Wells (London: Penguin, 2002), 25.
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mercantile activities in specific. Accommodation consisted of practices that allow remorseful transgressors to return to the bosom of the Church, but no positive endorsement of methodically controlled acquisitive activity existed. Weber chooses the phrase “Homo mercator vix aut nunquam deo potest placere” (the merchant can hardly or never please God) in Gratian’s collection of church laws (c. 1140) as indicative of limitations on enterprise. What is interesting in the passages above, however, is that Weber refers to the prohibition of usury and the related restitution of wrongful gain to illustrate his point. In the accompanying footnote, he notes: We can learn exactly how they used to come to terms with the ban on the taking of interest in, for example, Book I, chapter 65 of the statute of the Arte di Calimala .... : “The consuls must ensure that they make confession to those brethren [confessors] whom they judge most likely to pardon them, and that they do it in the manner most appropriate to the gift, service or reward received, in terms of the interest exacted for the past year, according to custom.” In other words, the guild obtains indulgence for its members through official channels and through submission to the Church. The instructions that follow are also highly typical of the a-moral character of capital gains, as well as, for example, the immediately preceding injunction (chap. 63) to record all interest and profits as “gifts.” Today’s stock exchange blacklisting of those who refuse to honor forward contracts by invoking the margin defense (Differenzeinwand) in court can be compared to the vilifying of those who went before an ecclesiastical court pleading exceptio usurariae pravitatis.20
Weber thus continues to draw on his dissertation to inform his assessment of commercial (and religious) medieval practices. From his analysis of the statutes of the Florentine Arte di Calimala, the prestigious guild of merchants of imported wool, he comes to the same conclusion as he did about fifteen years earlier. International merchants, facing the issue of usury on an almost daily basis, did not simply ignore religious concerns regarding their activities but found ways to adapt to them and assuage lingering doubts. In part this occurred through the aforementioned restitution, which could occur on a merchant’s deathbed, in part through the corporate 20
Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik, I,” 33 n.1; Weber, The Protestant Ethic, trans. Baehr and Wells, 51-2 n.36.
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practice of creative economic procedures that circumvented the prohibition of interest. At the end of the passage, Weber likens the defensive practices of medieval guilds to those of modern stockbrokers. The MWG edition of Weber’s writings on the stock exchange in 1894-189621 has made possible a better understanding of the origin of these words and their meaning, which has escaped all existing English translations of Weber’s Protestant Ethic writings. German civil law had traditionally not allowed forward or arbitrage contracts, which are contractual transactions based solely on the exploitation of the difference between an initially agreed-upon price and the price set later by the market or exchange. Since such contracts constituted gambling or betting, they were not enforceable, and the Differenzeinwand, or “margin defense,” was the legal defense used against claims in court lest such speculative contracts be enforced. However, stock market traders dealing among themselves could not invoke such a defense, and those who tried, in cases Weber encountered during his studies on the stock exchange, were indeed blacklisted and thus faced marginalization.22 As Weber puts it, the defense is analogous to medieval guilds’ strategies to vilify those invoking exceptio usurariae pravitatis, a defense based on the claim that one party’s contractual obligation derived from the other party’s depraved usury, rendering the contract unenforceable and thus the obligation non-binding.23
21
M. Weber, Börsenwesen: Schriften und Reden, 1893-1898, ed. K. Borchardt. MWG I/5 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1999). 22 K. Borchardt, “Einleitung” and “Editorischer Bericht,” in Weber, Börsenwesen, 28-31; Weber, Börsenwesen, 225, 507, 1040. 23 Weber, Börsenwesen, 220-1, 1044. Cf. the existing translations of the passage. For Talcott Parsons, traders who invoked the margin defense were “brokers who hold back the difference between top price and actual selling price” (M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), 204 n. 31); for Stephen Kalberg, these traders are those “who criticize orthodox procedures” and the exceptio usurariae pravitatis is a plea “for an exemption to the prohibition of usury” (Weber, The Protestant Ethic, trans. S. Kalberg, 178 n.35); and for Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells, the blacklisted traders are those “who take profits from differential rates” (Weber, The Protestant Ethic, trans. Baehr and Wells, 52, n.36). Economy and Society contains a better translation of a similar passage, see M. Weber, Economy and Society, ed. and trans. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1189.
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In a different part of the essay, Weber takes issue with those who argued that modern capitalism emerged because nascent capitalist entrepreneurs were finally able to shed the ballast of religious constraints on secular activities. He mainly addresses Sombart’s thesis in Der Moderne Kapitalismus (1902).24 Having written a splendid dissertation on the rural proletariat’s impoverishment and exploitation in the Roman campagna (1888) under the guidance of Gustav Schmoller, a leader of the younger Historical School of political economy, Sombart was attuned to a Marxist-materialist interpretation of economic history early in his career.25 In Der Moderne Kapitalismus, Sombart related to Karl Marx’s26 notion that feudal economic structures—rather than the existence of usury laws in itself—prevented assets generated through usurious practices from turning into industrial capital. Sombart argued that the medieval economy was craft-based and the ban on usury reflected its traditionalist ethic.27 The corollary of this position is that lifting the prohibition of interest signified a boost for the new modern capitalist spirit. Weber is not convinced by Sombart’s thesis. Simply put, because such restraints had not been a decisive factor in the Middle Ages, their relegation to marginal status in the early modern era could not account for the emergence of capitalism. Moreover, Weber argues, not only did Luther remain a traditionalist on usury and other economic matters, but also strands of ascetic Protestantism continued to be concerned about the morality of taking interest. Therefore, an alleged desire on their part to engage freely in what previously would have been considered a usurious transaction is squarely at odds with the historical record.28 He affirms this view a few years later in his rebuttals to Felix Rachfahl’s arguments, referring to Rachfahl’s “peripheral points about church doctrine on ‘usury’ in the Middle Ages,” which for
24 W. Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1902). 25 N. Stehr and R. Grundmann, “Introduction,” in W. Sombart, Economic Life in the Modern Age, ed. N. Stehr and R. Grundmann (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2001), xiii-xv. 26 K. Marx, Capital, trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1: 915. 27 Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, 1: 184-7. 28 Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik, I,” 9 n.1, and 45; Weber, The Protestant Ethic, trans. Baehr and Wells, 30, 46 n.13.
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economic development “are not at all decisive.”29 He traces the origins of the Church’s usury doctrine to a false reading of the Greek Vulgate translation of the Decretals,30 mentions the Church’s dealings with usury along with confession as examples of the ways in which the Church was willing to accommodate but not approve of moral shortcomings, including those that resulted in ethically questionable economic practices, and alludes to modern Catholicism’s much more lenient dealings with those matters.31 This position not only reflects a shift in Weber’s work toward a sociology of medieval Catholicism32 but also echoes the views of Ernst Troeltsch, with whom Weber formed a “friendship between experts” that led to much cross-fertilization in their work.33 In articles later included in The Economic Teachings of the Christian Churches34 Troeltsch posited that the medieval Church affirmed its claim to “absolute universalism” through the establishment and enforcement of a unitary religious culture that bound all Christians together by a fellowship of love,35 and it rejected usury as a violation of the communitarian ethic of brotherhood.36 Such a process of universalizing ethical notions, Weber realized, necessitated the lowering of some standards (for the laity), including accommodating economic practices to a certain extent while formally drawing sharp distinctions between ethical and unethical activities. By 1910, with
29
M. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, II: Kritiken und Antikritiken, 5th ed., ed. J. Winkelmann (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1987), 167; M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic Debate: Max Webers’ Replies to His Critics, 1907-1910, ed. D. J. Chalcraft and A. Harrington, trans. A. Harrington and M. Shields (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), 73. 30 M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte: Nachlass, Teilband 2: Religiöse Gemeinschaften, ed. H. G. Kippenberg. MWG I/22-5 (Tübingen: Mohr, 2001), 377 n.11. 31 Weber, Die protestanische Ethik, II, 341 n.20; Weber, The Protestant Ethic Debate, 129 n.20. 32 L. Kaelber, Schools of Asceticism: Ideology and Organization in Medieval Religious Communities (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 112. 33 F. W. Graf, “Friendship between Experts: Notes on Weber and Troeltsch,” in W. J. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel, eds., Max Weber and His Contemporaries (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 215-33. 34 E. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. O. Wyon (New York: Macmillan, [1912] 1956). 35 Troeltsch, Social Teaching, 55-58. 36 Troeltsch, Social Teaching, 128, 319-20.
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Troeltsch’s input, usury had thereby become part of Weber’s reflections on the role of religion for economic development.
Usury in Comparative and Systematic Perspective: Weber’s Later Writings Several influences on Weber’s views are evident in the revised Protestant Ethic, his writings on the economic ethics of the world religions, and the sections on religious communities and secular and religious rulership in Economy and Society. Weber elaborated on Troeltsch’s views but also took on recent arguments by Franz Keller and Sombart. In the revised Protestant Ethic, medieval Catholicism is afforded a more prominent role. Two new insertions concern the prohibition of interest. In one Weber asserts the validity of his earlier remarks to Rachfahl, that for the emergence of modern capitalism’s vocational ethic, and, as he underlines, only in this context, the canonical prohibition of usury played no significant role.37 In the other insertion, which is one of the longest, Weber responds to what can only be described as puzzling claims made by the Catholic theologian Franz Keller and by Sombart. In two separate publications, Keller38 and Sombart39 turned the existing paradigm concerning usury upside down. Keller claimed inter alia that the Church’s ban on usury pertained only to emergency loans made in cases of sudden privation. Such a tightly confined prohibition of the taking of interest helped rather than hindered capitalist development, he40 maintained, because it cut short entrepreneurs’ ability to make a profit through illegitimate means and prevented the loss of capital stock of temporarily impoverished craftsmen and others in need, who would soon again be able to contribute to the economy. Keller 37
M. Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze, 27/The Protestant Ethic, trans. Kalberg, 168 n.23. 38 F. Keller, Unternehmung und Mehrwert: Eine sozial-ethische Studie zur Geschäftsmoral (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1912). 39 W. Sombart, Der Bourgeois: Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1913); Luxus und Kapitalismus (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1913); and The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Study of the History and Psychology of the Modern Business Man, trans. M. Epstein (New York: Dutton, 1915). 40 Keller, Unternehmung, 24-8.
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made this argument in the space of a few pages and with barely a reference to historical documents. Nevertheless, Sombart expanded on it in Der Bourgeois,41 perhaps influenced by Keller’s favorable treatment of Sombart’s previous work. Seemingly intent on finding the capitalist spirit’s roots in anything but Weber’s Puritans, Sombart advanced an ever-increasing hodgepodge of explanations. He attributed an important role in the genesis of modern capitalism to the Jews,42 trade in luxury goods,43 war,44 and, lastly, the fusion of adventure capitalism (for which he credits in part the European Jewry) with the modern bourgeois’ rational calculability.45 Sombart’s claim was as simple as Keller’s: by forgoing loans, money had to seek more productive purposes and was thus invested in business, since profit, unlike interest, was not affected by religious prohibitions.46 Like Keller, Sombart furnished few references to literature supportive of this view. In his response in the Protestant Ethic, Weber is as defensive as he had been against Rachfahl. Calling Sombart’s publication “a book ‘with a thesis’ in the worst sense of this expression” and the “by far the weakest ... of his larger studies,”47 he affirms his earlier positions: The truth is that [1] the church began to reconsider the prohibition of interest only at a rather late time; [2] at the time when this happened the forms of purely business investment were not loans at a fixed interest rate but the foenus nauticum, commenda, societas maris, and the dare ad proficuum de mari ... yet other than by a few rigorous canonists they were not held to fall under the ban; [3] when investments at a fixed rate of interest and discounting became possible and common, they encountered discernable difficulties stemming from the
41
Sombart, Der Bourgeois; Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism. W. Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1911); W. Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. M. Epstein (London: Unwin, 1913). 43 W. Sombart, Luxus und Kapitalismus (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1913); W. Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism, trans. W. R. Dittmar (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1967). 44 W. Sombart, Krieg und Kapitalismus (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1913). 45 Sombart, Der Bourgeois. 46 Sombart, Der Bourgeois, 314-22. 47 Weber, “Die protestantische,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze, 27 n.2; 57 n.; Weber, The Protestant Ethic, trans. Kalberg, 168 n.25; 176 n.32. 42
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prohibition of usury, which led merchant guilds to adopt drastic defensive measures (blacklisting!); [4] the canonists’ treatment of usury was purely formal-legalistic, and without any such tendency to “protect capital” as Keller ascribed to them; [5] lastly, the Church’s attitude toward capitalism, in so far as it can be ascertained at all, was determined by, on the on hand, a traditional hostility, mostly diffusely held, toward the growing power of capital, which was impersonal and hence not readily amenable to ethical control ... ; on the other hand, the necessity for accommodation.48
Convoluted in the original German, this passage succinctly depicts Weber’s views on usury shortly before his death. They had not changed significantly since his studies under Goldschmidt. The ban on usury does not rank among the chief reasons capitalism, in its “modern” manifestation in form and spirit, did not develop in the Middle Ages, nor was the Church’s rejection of interest in return for giving loans, while firm,49 responsible for the investment of money in ethically less clouded forms of investments such as partnerships. Rather, as Weber notes in an earlier passage in the same note, “parallels to the prohibition of interest are to be found in almost all religious ethics around the world.”50 These views touch on two larger issues Weber raised in two main projects in the last decade of his life: the importance of external religious guidelines for secular action, and the relationship between religion (as a societal order) and the economy. Weber addressed the former in his comparative studies on the world religions and the latter in Economy and Society. Weber’s statement regarding a prominent existence of usury rules in religious ethics is an implicit reference to, and a result of, his comparative studies of the economic ethics of the world religions, where he transcends the Protestant Ethic’s much more circumscribed theme of religious contributions to modern capitalism. In the con48
Weber, “Die protestantische” in Gesammelte Aufsätze, 57-8 n.; Weber, The Protestant Ethic, trans. Kalberg, 176 n.32. 49 Cf. Weber’s other major critic, Lujo Brentano, who held that the Church had effectively given up on regulating interest rates in the late Middle Ages and accepted a ceiling on interest rates. Weber did not respond. See L. Brentano, Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus (Munich: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1916), 21. 50 Weber, “Die protestantische” in Gesammelte Aufsätze, 56 n.1; Weber, The Protestant Ethic, trans. Kalberg, 176 n.32.
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text of those studies Weber notes that Islam scorned usury,51 as did Indian Brahminism,52 whereas Confucianism and Taoism, due to their rationalism of “world adjustment,”53 did not at all or only to a very limited extent.54 Judaism is more difficult to characterize. Elaborating on remarks made in his studies on agrarian history in 1908, where he briefly touched on the issue of interest in Israel,55 Weber in his study on ancient Judaism traces religious provisions that allowed lending money at interest to strangers to the economic ethics of an oppressed people. Relevant passages in the Torah were interpreted, for both political and religious reasons, to mean that the taking of interest was allowed only from gentiles. Although voices existed which rejected this in-group versus out-group morality, the marginalization of Jews, for which Weber used the controversial concept of a “pariah people,” ensured the continued existence of this morality.56 However, Weber does not go nearly as far as the increasingly anti-Semitic Sombart, who argued that Jews had a special propensity to trade and barter and by extracting profit from money lending contributed to the emergence of the adventure spirit Sombart associated with modern capitalism.57 In terms of prohibiting the 51
Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Kippenberg, 435; Weber, Economy and Society, 625. 52 M. Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Hinduismus und Buddhismus: 1916-1920, ed. H. Schmidt-Glintzer, MWG I/20 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1996), 118; M. Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and D. Martindale (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1967), 56; M. Weber, Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Abriss der universalen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, ed. J. Winckelmann, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958), 235; M. Weber, General Economic History, trans. F. Knight (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1981), 268. 53 W. Schluchter, Rationalism, Religion, and Domination, trans. N. Solomon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 85-116. 54 M. Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Konfuzianismus und Taoismus: Schriften 1915-1920, ed. H. Schmidt-Glintzer, MWG I/19 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1989), 279, 354-5; M. Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth (New York: Free Press, 1964), 100, 159. 55 M. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988), 86, 90; M. Weber, Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, trans. R. I. Frank. London: Verso, 1998), 137, 142-3. 56 M. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie III (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988), 357-58; M. Weber, Ancient Judaism, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and D. Martindale (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 342-3. 57 For discussion, see Stehr and Grundmann, “Introduction,” xxxiii-xxxix.
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taking of interest, Weber makes clear, Judaism is not the most permissive religion, and it is not a crucial issue: The core of the obstacle [to developing modern capitalism] did not lie in such particular difficulties [as bans on interest in money lending], which every one of the great religious systems on its way has placed, or has seemed to place, in the way of the modern economy. The core of the obstruction was in the ‘spirit’ of the whole system.58
The taking of interest in return for a loan is thus only one of many prohibited or negatively stereotyped activities that could interpose obstacles to secular activities. Yet they were externally imposed; hence, unless accompanied by internal changes that redirected people’s motives, ideas, and interests, they do not prevent the economic process from running its course. A system of external religious prohibitions cultivated from the outside but not from the inside: it could not thoroughly penetrate economic actions with an inner value.59 This helps explain why in spite of variations in the prohibition of taking interest—none or little in Confucianism and Taoism, from other Jews in Judaism, from anyone in late medieval Christianity—none of these religions “developed” modern capitalism and introduced economic rationalization. The prohibition was not a decisive factor; if it had been, then areas influenced by Confucianism and Taoism should have been the first to usher in the modern rationalized economy. The role of medieval Catholicism in this process was traditional, for it did not provide psychological incentives for the pursuit of ethically tempered acquisitiveness. At best, it produced a “naïve affirmation of the world,”60 not ascetic Protestantism’s world mastery. Weber addresses this issue on a more general level in the context of the relationship between the economy and other societal orders in Economy and Society. Two chapters, both located in the older part,
58 Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Hinduismus, 194; Weber, The Religion of India, 112. 59 Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Konfuzianismus, 457, 460; Weber, The Religion of China, 232, 235; Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Kippenberg, 348; Weber, Economy and Society, 562. 60 Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Konfuzianismus, 115; M. Weber, From Max Weber, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 291.
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concern usury. One thematizes the relationship between secular and religious rulership, which is part of Weber’s sociology of domination;61 the other, on religious communities, ties his writings on the economy in its relationship to other societal orders to his comparative writings in the sociology of religion.62 Though the chapters’ foci differ, Weber’s references to usury are similar and some passages virtually identical.63 Weber notes that while Christianity from early on rejected ingroup versus out-group morality in its emphasis on what Troeltsch had called “absolute universalism,” it developed its strongest rejection of the countervailing ethics, those of the “market,” in its opposition to interest when confronting the acceleration of economic growth in the twelfth century. This reflects a “principal struggle between an ethical and economic rationalization of the economy.”64 The Church attempted to come to grips with the amoral forces represented by the economy by means of a rationalization of the ethics that governed its hierocratic means, the dispensation of grace. This took the form of elaborate casuistries by Canon scholars. Next to the notion of a “just price” (justum pretium) in economic transactions, usury was one of the foils against which they could construct a moral code of ethical behavior in the secular world vis-à-vis the impersonalization and “a-morality” brought about by the market place. As he did originally in his dissertation, Weber stresses repeatedly that the systematization of religious ethics did not reflect material conditions and the unfolding of usury prohibitions is inconsistent with a materialist conception of history.65 Moreover, he alludes to the same means of evading or circumventing
61
E. Hanke, “Max Webers ‘Herrschaftssoziologie’: Eine werkgeschichtliche Studie,” in E. Hanke and W. J. Mommsen, eds., Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie: Studien zur Entstehung und Wirkung (Tübingen: Mohr, 2001), 19-46. 62 Schluchter, Rationalism, 411-32; H. G. Kippenberg, “Einleitung,” in Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Kippenberg, 1-83; but see W. J. Mommsen, “Max Weber’s ‘Grand Sociology’: The Origins and Composition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Soziologie,” History and Theory 39 (2000): 364-83. 63 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Kippenberg, 376-83; Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. 5th, rev. ed., ed. J. Winckelmann (Tübingen: Mohr, 1985), 710-12; Weber, Economy and Society, 583-87, 1188-91. 64 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Kippenberg, 377-8; Weber, Economy and Society, 584. 65 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Kippenberg, 377; Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Winckelmann, 711; Weber, Economy and Society, 584, 1189.
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the ban on taking interest as in the original Protestant Ethic; i.e., the blacklisting of guild members who go before ecclesiastical courts, the purchase of general indulgences, and merchants’ testamentary gifts of conscience money and charitable endowments as posthumous restitution of usury. The latter together with the elaboration of the system of penance and the establishment of ecclesiastical pawn lending institutions in the montes pietatis signify provisions by which the Church acquiesced to ethical conundrums resulting from economic action.66 In all, the summary judgment is the same as it had been all along: the practical consequences of the Church’s ban on usury, while “difficult to estimate,” was that of being a burden on economic affairs, pushing it along the direction of a “moral declassement and obstacle to a rational business ethic.” Ultimately, it was “nowhere really successful in cultivating the development of capitalism ... and increasingly became a mere impediment of commercial life.”67
Conclusion: Weber, Medieval Catholicism, and Modern Debates on the Role of Usury This analysis has shown that usury was not of marginal importance in Weber’s writings. The fact that Weber considered the religious proscription of usurious practices at most a detriment and at least a nuisance to pre-modern economic development certainly does not imply that a sociological exploration of usury provisions and their impact on actual practices is unwarranted—just as no one, by way of analogy, would want to argue that the analysis of Confucianism or Islam is unimportant merely because these religions, at least according to Weber, did not help bring forth modern capitalism. In fact, Weber considered the Church’s policies toward usury, next to its doctrine of a just price, its practices of penance, and its system of a monastic supererogatory accumulation of merit,68 to be a core element of medieval Christianity’s salvation economy. Had 66 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Kippenberg, 382-3; Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Winckelmann, 711; Weber, Economy and Society, 587, 118990. 67 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Kippenberg, 381-3; Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Winckelmann, 711; Weber, Economy and Society, 587, 1190. 68 Kaelber, Schools of Asceticism, 46-55.
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Weber been able to carry out the remaining studies on the economic ethics of the world religions, he would have addressed the inner workings of this salvation economy in his intended study on Christianity. Usury, one might reasonably argue, would have played an important role in it. Given the time that has passed since Weber’s death, however, do his views have any pertinence to recent scholarship? Current scholarship on medieval religion is less inclined to provide a broad characterization of a period spanning close to a millennium than Weber, whose views were steeped in contemporary presuppositions of Cultural Protestantism with its anti-Catholic and anti-Lutheran elements.69 Even though Weber may have intended his statements to constitute ideal-typical depictions, many of them appear too general, without sufficient contextualization, and badly in need of revision in view of newer findings. For example, medievalists point to twelfth-century developments in the profit economy,70 religious dissent,71 reason,72 and literacy73 as crucial transformations toward more rationalized European societies even before the onset of the Italian Renaissance. Such studies shatter the impression of a relative continuity in medieval culture, and perhaps even backwardness, one might get from Weber’s admittedly fragmented remarks. They do, however, broadly support Weber’s (and Goldschmidt’s) notion of a relatively high degree of autonomy of the economic sphere from religious interference, and relate advances toward a modern type of market economy to developments in spheres other than religion. While usury has not been a topic of interest for sociologists since Nelson,74 it has received ample attention from medievalist econo69
G. Hübinger, Kulturprotestantismus und Politik: Zum Verhältnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr, 1994). 70 L. K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). 71 H. Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans. S. Rowan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). 72 A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). 73 B. Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 74 Nelson, The Idea. An anonymous reviewer for Max Weber Studies took me
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mists and historians. Their studies fall into three categories: (1) neo-classical economists’ attempts at addressing the impact on usury; (2) comparative studies that have begun to expand Weber’s inquiries into other world religions and address Christian usury provisions in the light of other religions’ tenets and practices; and (3) a multifaceted controversy about Weber’s core question of how much the prohibition on taking interest on a loan impeded economic development. Economists have recently begun to address usury in the Middle Ages using neo-classical models. Robert Ekelund et al.75 proposed the following argument: leaders of the medieval Catholic church were no different from entrepreneurs heading economic firms in their attempts to become monopolistic suppliers of goods and services by establishing public policies that give them a comparative advantage over competitors. Such “rent-seeking behavior” can also be found, the authors contend, in the Church’s usury policies, designated to keep interest rates low and allowing the Church to borrow money more cheaply than in a competitive market environment, while at the same time restricting competition under conditions in which the Church was herself a creditor. Yet not only does this approach fit the historical development of the Church’s economic condition and its usury doctrines poorly,76 it is also inferior to task for claiming Nelson all too readily as a sociologist with the argument that Nelson was a trained medievalist and only later turned to social science (Parsons, Freud, and Weber). It is true that Nelson received both his master’s (in 1933) and doctorate (in 1944) in medieval history. However, as a prodigious reader, Nelson undoubtedly explored materials beyond the more specialized range of medieval/Renaissance studies as early as while preparing his dissertation, and with certainty extended his subsequent studies beyond those three scholars. The voluminous collection of Nelson’s papers housed at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library awaits exploration to shed more light on this topic. I wish to thank Dr. Donald Nielsen, once a doctoral student of Nelson, for kindly supplying me with some of this information. 75 R. B. Ekelund, Jr., R. F. Hébert, and R. D. Tollison, “An Economic Model of the Medieval Church: Usury as a Form of Rent Seeking,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 5 (1989): 307-31; R. B. Ekelund, Jr., et al., Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 76 See E. L. Glaeser and J. Scheinkman, “Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be: An Economic Analysis of Interest Restrictions and Usury Laws,” Journal of Law and Economics 41 (1998): 1-36; C. G. Reed and C. T. Bekar, “Religious Prohibitions Against Usury,” Explorations in Economic History 40
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to Weber’s, for it relies on the assumption that the Church’s policies were driven by the intent to bring about economic results rather than moral reform. It is more compelling, Weber showed, to assume that when a hierocratic institution is embedded in a political and economic structure in which it can influence but not dominate public policies, it will respond to a rationalization in politics and the economy that intrudes into its own sphere (as in the twelfth century) by a rationalization of its own, namely in its ethical doctrine toward those spheres. Rather than being a reflection of changing material conditions, as some neo-classical economists want to have it—one might recall Sombart’s position outlined earlier in this paper—usury policies may thus be in sharper conflict with economic practices. Such policies may become more, not less valuerational, as rationalizations in societal spheres develop according to their own logic and quite possibly in different directions, which may lead to sharper conflicts between these spheres.77 Weber’s “political economy” model of usury policies, which affords religion the ability to contribute autochthonous elements to such policies, therefore deserves more recognition in these debates. The neo-classical model, at least as currently applied to medieval ecclesiastical policy, appears to represent a step back from Weber’s studies and might benefit from drawing on some of Weber’s insights. The comparative aspect of Weber’s writings on usury has been taken up by an increasing number of studies that go beyond Christianity. One of the first scholars to engage in this line of work was Nelson, who prefaced his exploration of Christian usury doctrines with a study of usury provisions in Judaism.78 Since then, scholars have studied Jewish vis-à-vis Christian lenders in the Middle Ages,79 and Islamic views toward usury in this and other periods.80 A truly comparative analysis of religious prohibitions against usury that (2003): 347-68. 77 Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Konfuzianismus, 479-522; Weber, From Max Weber, 323-59. 78 Nelson, The Idea, xix-xxii. 79 J. Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); S. Herman, Medieval Usury and the Commercialization of Feudal Bonds (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993). 80 N. A. Saleh, Unlawful Gain and Legitimate Profit in Islamic Law: Riba, Gharar, and Islamic Banking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); R. Lohlker, Das islamische Recht im Wandel: Riba, Zins und Wucher in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Münster: Waxmann, 1999).
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includes doctrines81 as well as their secular impact appears to be still in its infancy, however. Finally, historians have paid much attention to the emergence of the usury doctrine in the Middle Ages and early modern era, and to the ways economic practice reflected them or reacted to it. Their findings defy simple description. In regard to development of doctrine, there exists now a rich literature on how Canon lawyers and Church theologians defined and classified usurious practices. This literature shows their teachings constituted no monolithic set of teachings but a sometimes discordant set of voices on a common theme.82 The variations in their views seem far too great to accord with the impression of a strong consistency one might get from reading Weber and his contemporaries. Yet Weber’s overall argument, that the ecclesiastical teachings did not simply become more “capital friendly” but rather more stringent on usurious loans—as distinguished from other, actually or possibly legitimate forms of taking interest, including delayed repayment, cessant gain, emergent loss or damages, sharing of risk, annuities, and exchange dealing83—is not refuted. Nor is there evidence that disputes over usury simply ceased with the Reformation, as if such disputes were merely a reflection of the advent of modern capitalism on the
81 For example, S. L. Buckley, Teachings on Usury in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2000). 82 See especially T. P. McLaughlin, “The Teaching of the Canonists on Usury (XII, XIII and XIV Centuries),” Mediaeval Studies 1 (1939): 81-147; T. P. McLaughlin, “The Teaching of the Canonists on Usury (XII, XIII and XIV Centuries),” Mediaeval Studies 2 (1940): 1-22; J. T. Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957); J. W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); O. Langholm, The Aristotelian Analysis of Usury (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1984); O. Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools: Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money, and Usury According to the Paris Theological Tradition, 1200-1350 (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 83 These are discussed in the aforementioned literature. Regarding the Church’s “accommodation” of business lending and public finance, see C. Menning, Charity and State in Late Renaissance Italy: The Monte di Pietà of Florence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993) for the credit lending practices of the montes pietatis, and L. Armstrong, “The Politics of Usury in Trecento Florence: The Questio de Monte of Francesco da Empoli,” Mediaeval Studies 61 (1999): 1-44; L. Armstrong, Usury and Public Debt in Early Renaissance Florence: Lorenzo Ridolfi on the ‘Monte Comune’ (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2003) for the religious accommodation of interest on communal public debt in Florence.
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super-structural plane.84 On the contrary, such disputes were played out with particular intensity in ascetic Protestant groupings.85 Moreover, Weber seems vindicated in rejecting simplistic assumptions about individuals or corporate entities as simply being rational utility-maximizing agents in religious markets86 who operate on the basis of strategic economic interests rather than longstanding normative concerns and ethical principles.87 But the crux of the matter is actual practice. While there is evidence of merchants so bothered by soteriological implications of their usurious activities that they paid considerable restitution on their deathbed,88 which implies that Church doctrine had not deterred them from engaging in these activities in the first place, historians have achieved no consensus on the extent to which usury doctrine influenced business practices and was a detriment to economic development. The still dominant view, that the Church’s condemnation of usurious loans “did nothing to shackle the development of capitalism”89 and was “never a hindrance to the growth
84 N. L. Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); E. Kerridge, Usury, Interest, and the Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 85 M. Valeri, “Religious Discipline and the Market: Puritans and the Issue of Usury,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 747-68. 86 For example, Rodney Stark, “SSSR Presidential Address, 2004: Putting an End to Ancestor Worship,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43 (2004): 465-74. 87 O. Langholm, The Merchant in the Confessional: Trade and Price in the Pre-Reformation Penitential Handbooks (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 88 B. Nelson, “The Usurer and the Merchant Prince: Italian Businessmen and the Ecclesiastical Law of Restitution,” Journal of Economic History 7 (Supplement) (1947): 104-22; F. Edler de Roover, “Restitution in Renaissance Florence,” in Studi in onore di Armando Sapori (Milan: Instituto Editoriale Cisalpino, 1957), 775-89; F. L. Galassi, “Buying a Passport to Heaven: Usury, Restitution, and the Merchants of Medieval Genoa,” Religion 22 (1992): 313-26; L. Armstrong, “Usury, Conscience, and Public Debt: Angelo Corbinelli’s Testament of 1419,” in J. A. Marino and T. Kuehn, eds., A Renaissance of Conflicts: Visions and Revisions of Law and Society in Italy and Spain (Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2004), 173-240. 89 J. Le Goff, “The Usurer and Purgatory,” in The Dawn of Modern Banking (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979): 25. LeGoff describes the birth of purgatory as a way of allowing usurers to avoid eternal damnation. See J. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); J. Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life, trans. P. Ranum (New York: Zone, 1988).
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of credit institutions,”90 has been tempered by the recognition, associated with the works of Raymond de Roover and others, that the prohibition had a certain steering function in guiding banking away from loans and toward exchange transactions and annuities.91 Since the prohibition applied to all loans but usury concerns could be circumvented much more readily in investment credit transactions, or avoided altogether in investments in most forms of commercial partnerships, such a function could indeed be readily observed in those areas of commerce and finance.92 Moreover, the ecclesiastical teachings were not equitably enforced. If anything, the petty pawnbrokers and small lenders of emergency loans for immediate consumptive needs were marginalized or forced out of the market if not legally protected by a charter or a license, which ironically drove interest rates up instead of down, while larger lenders and companies were less likely to suffer the opprobrium of usury when engaging in credit-bearing transactions.93 The research on evasive practices engendered by the prohibition of usury, together with the exploration of its unintended consequences, will likely continue to fuel debates among historians about religion’s role in the emergence of modern capitalism. Many themes in these debates still resonate with Weber’s exploration. While it is true that Weber relied on a much narrower base of documents than economic historians have access to today, his approach to studying usury provisions as an important example of the ways in which religious ideas might shape and direct secular mate90
R. Lopez, “The Dawn of Modern Banking,” in The Dawn of Modern Banking (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 22; see also H.-J. Gilomen, “Wucher und Wirtschaft im Mittelalter,” Historische Zeitschrift 250 (1990): 265-301. 91 J. Kirshner, “Raymond de Roover on Scholastic Economic Thought,” in J. Kirshner, ed., Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Selected Studies of Raymond de Roover (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974), 32-33; J. Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution: Usury, Rentes, and Negotiablity,” International History Review 25 (2003): 505-62. 92 E. S. Hunt and J. M. Murray, A History of Business in Medieval Europe, 1200-1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 70-4; D. Wood, Medieval Economic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 181-205. 93 For example, F. C. Lane and R. C. Mueller, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 75-8; Gilomen, Wucher, 290-5.
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rial interests can still be considered relevant to these debates.94 Usury, Weber thought, played a significant role in medieval religion’s moral economy and was an integral part of his sociology of religion and writings on the relationship between religion and the economy. Therefore it was an important topic; as an issue, it occupied institutions and sometimes posed stark ethical choices for individuals. Modern historians agree, and so did the fourteenth-century Italian Benvenuto de Rambaldis da Imola: “He who commits usury goes to hell, he who doesn’t, faces penury.”95
94 Cf. K. L. Reyerson, “Der Aufstieg des Bürgertums und die religiöse Vergemeinschaftung im mittelalterlichen Europa,” in W. Schluchter, ed., Max Webers Sicht des okzidentalen Christentums (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988), 410-36. 95 Gilomen, Wucher, 265.
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THE KING’S BUSINESS IN AFRICA: DECISIONS AND STRATEGIES OF THE PORTUGUESE CROWN Ivana Elbl
Introduction In his recent AHA presidential address, Joseph C. Miller called for return to a humanist approach to history and to rigorous historicism.1 There are few areas where this approach can be more useful than in assessing the nature and roots of the early overseas expansion. The entrepreneurial role of the Portuguese Crown in the overseas expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is intricately woven into debates on the origins of modernity and the capitalist economy. The purpose of these debates is to discover the historical moments of change, breaks with the old and the emergence of the new. As Luís Felipe Thomaz has recently pointed out, past historiography has created a double trap for those analysing the early Portuguese overseas expansion: the nineteenth-century tradition, which hailed the overseas expansion for its contribution to scientific discovery and the unfolding of human horizons, and the twentieth-century reaction to this heroizing approach, which stressed a societal and structuralist approach and sought answers in economic and social processes.2 Yet, in different ways, both trends saw the overseas expansion and the role of the Portuguese state as a break with the past and a foretaste of a modern, capitalist future. The role of the Portuguese Crown in the economy of the early overseas expansion is thus deeply entangled in an ideological and 1
Joseph C. Miller, “Presidential Address: History and Africa/Africa and History,” The American Historical Review 104 (1999): 25-32. 2 Luís Felipe Thomaz, “Le Portugal, et l’Afrique au XVe siècle: Les débuts de l’expansion,” Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português 26 (1989): 161-2. The article was reprinted, in Portuguese, in L. F. Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor (Lisbon: Difel, 1994), under the title “A evolução da política expansionista portuguesa na primeira metade de quatrocentos” (pp. 43-147). The foremost representative of the Braudelian school of economic historians in Portugal was Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, the leading figure in the study of economic aspects of the Portuguese overseas expansion.
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epistemological modelling that is essentially presentist. Rather than following the flow of history from a deeper to a more recent past, it looks back into the past from a contemporary viewpoint. While not without usefulness, this approach invites anachronistic and monist explanations, both of which have made a deep imprint on the historiography of the overseas enterprise of the Portuguese Crown.3 Many modern historians perceived the overseas enterprise of the Portuguese Crown as a substantial innovation in commercial capitalism. Manuel Nunes Dias’ enduring concept of the “capitalismo monárquico português” (Portuguese state capitalism) constitutes only one reflection of the essential place the Portuguese overseas ventures have been assigned in the various theories and historical models of the emergence of capitalism.4 It is easily overlooked, however, that the decisions and strategies that the Portuguese Crown had adopted in connection with its African enterprises were based on continuity with pre-existing practices and administrative methods,5 rather than on innovation and change. 3 For an excellent and extensive summary of the historiography of the early Portuguese expansion and its perceived links to the emergence of capitalism see Luís Felipe Thomaz, “Expansão portuguesa e expansão europeia— Reflexões em torno da génese dos descobrimentos,” in L. F. Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor (Lisbon: Difel, 1994), 1-41. 4 Manuel Nunes Dias, O capitalismo monárquico português (1415-1549) (Coimbra: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, 1963-4), 2 vols. See in particular the section “A definição do capitalismo monárquico” (vol. 2, 189216). For the period he covered, the basic precepts of the economic part of Nunes Dias’ interpretation are still generally accepted by contemporary leading scholars. The main criticisms of his theory focus on his neglect of ideological factors. See for example Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Luís Felipe Thomaz, “Evolution of Empire: The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean during the Sixteenth Century,” in Political Economy of Empires, edited by James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 301-2. Unlike the ideological aspects, the socio-economic and administrative history of the fifteenth and early sixteenth-century expansion has been somewhat neglected lately. The selection of articles in some of the recent collections, such as Tracy, The Political Economy of Empires, Mark A. Burkholder, ed. Administrators of Empire (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate) and David Armitage, ed., Theories of Empire (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1998) illustrates this trend clearly by focussing on the later sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. 5 For a seminal overview of the evolution of Portuguese state finances see Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, “Finanças públicas e estrutura do Estado,”in Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, Ensaios II sobre história de Portugal (Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa, 1968), 25-63. The late medieval Portuguese finances followed a pattern similar to those of Castile, explored in great detail by Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, in particular his Fiscalidad y poder real en Castilla (1252-1389)
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The Crown’s response to overseas economic opportunities were grounded in contemporary needs and attitudes, in other words in the historical context which they were a part of. Like other late medieval noble enterprises, the Crown overseas ventures cannot be fully understood using the modern concepts of private or state enterprise, but require an appreciation of the economics of the noble household, with the royal household as its most complex form. The revenues of a noble household, including that of the king, were crucial but subordinate tools in fulfilling loftier goals, mostly social or political in nature. In other words, wealth was not a final objective, but a means through which the quest for power and honour could be satisfied. There was no strict division between economic and non-economic projects. On the contrary, economic enterprises and ideologically motivated goals tended to be mutually supportive, at least in principle. Late medieval states and other autonomous units, whether feudal or communal, were faced with growing expenditures, especially those associated with war. The problem of growing costs was compounded by a crisis in revenues, reflecting the triple scourge of epidemics, wars and famines, all of which contributed to a sharp demographic decline that did not begin to reverse itself until the second half of the fifteenth century. This decline affected both royal and noble revenues, whether they were generated by income from land holdings and rents, proceeds from regalian rights, or customs and taxes sanctioned by tradition. The resulting dissatisfaction among the noble elites constituted an explosive political issue, which most monarchs of the period had to face. The Portuguese Crown found itself in the unenviable position of not only having to deal with its own fiscal problems but also to alleviate the social and political crises experienced by its most powerful subjects.6 (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1993) and La hacienda real de Castilla en el siglo XV (La Laguna: s.n., 1973), For a summary of his findings in English see Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, “Castile in the Middle Ages,” in Richard Bonney, ed., The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200-1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 177-199. 6 For an excellent summary of these developments see the works of Luís Felipe Thomaz referred to above. For an extensive overview, see also A. H. de Oliveira Marques, Portugal na crise dos séculos XIV e XV (Lisbon: Presença, 1987); João José Alves Dias, ed., Portugal do renascimento à crise dinástica (Lisbon: Presença, 1998); José Mattoso, ed., História de Portugal, Vol. 2, A monárquia feudal (1096-1480) and Vol. 3, No alvoroço da modernidade (Lisbon:
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The early overseas expansion represented a windfall for the Crown. It offered a partial solution to a number of severe problems confronting the kingdom. The overseas ventures were a source of socially sanctioned opportunities, new lands, and new sources of income. They also enhanced the Crown’s power and the means to implement its will by significantly enlarging its revenues through enlarging the royal fazenda (direct holdings), and through creating opportunities to implement new taxation, customs fees, and other sources of monetary income. However, neither economic rationality nor revenue as such were the paramount factors in the Crown’s decision-making: the ultimate objectives were prestige and political power at home.
Royal Power and the African Enterprise It is important to realize that the Portuguese Crown became a dominant economic player in the early overseas expansion not necessarily because of its share in the enterprise, but because of the paramount political and legislative power it wielded. The extensive rights the Crown claimed over the early overseas enterprise were derived from the medieval notion of the king's sovereignty over his realm. The king had the right to decide how the kingdom’s resources were to be used for the common good and to divide the available wealth among his followers. The revertibility of fiefs and other holdings back to the Crown was one of the key precepts of feudal law. In principle, all unassigned or newly acquired resources belonged to the Crown, and the King had the right to use them as he saw fit. In the Iberian context, the formative experience and memory of the reconquista provided a vivid reinforcement to this fundamental idea. The Portuguese Crown based its policies concerning access to and trade with Africa and other non-Christian areas on these time-honoured principles, both in theory and in practice. Thus, although the first overseas explorations in Africa were undertaken on the initiative of private persons, such as Infante D. Henrique and Infante D. Pedro, the Portuguese Crown had the paramount claim to any tangible results of such ventures because they Estampa, 1993); and A. H. de Oliveira Marques, ed., A expansão quatrocentista (Lisbon: Estampa, 1998).
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were carried out by sworn vassals of the king, in the name of the king and in the “service of God and the King.” In the international arena, the Crown first justified its title to overseas dominium invoking the rights of first discovery by its subjects. Subsequently, however, a more powerful justificatory argument was developed. On 8 January 1455, the hard-pressed Pope Nicholas V yielded to the skilful diplomatic pressure of the Portuguese delegation and issued the bull Romanus Pontifex, which declared that the Portuguese Crown was to hold dominium over the access to Africa south of Cape Bojador, to the exclusion of all other Christians, as a reward for its costly military effort against Islam. No power or person was to deprive the beneficiaries of the bull of their just reward. The revenues generated from the new terrritories were thus conceptualized as a redress for damages suffered and as a just reward for the Crown’s service to God.7 Whoever should deprive the Crown of its well-deserved rewards, directly or indirectly, would show disrespect both for the Apostolic authority of the Pope and for the service rendered by Portugal to God. The Bull carefully spelled out the ecclesiastical prohibition against any military, commercial, and fishing expeditions not authorized by the King of Portugal or D. Henrique.8 Interloping south of the Cape Bojador, or even organizing or ordering interloping expeditions, were declared to be offences punishable by excommunication if the offender was an individual or by interdict in the case of corporate bodies.9 An excerpt from the Bull stipulating these measures was to be posted on the doors of principal churches and announced to the public from the pulpit, and also sent to major potentates within and outside of the Iberian peninsula.10 The Romanus Pontifex did not content itself with relying only on the argument of a just reward but exploited the long-standing canon law principle that the Pope possessed the right to regulate contacts
7 João Martins da Silva Marques, ed., Descobrimentos portugueses. Documentos para a sua história, vol. 1, 1147-1460 (Lisbon: Instituto para a Alta Cultura, 1444), 505 (doc. 401). 8 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 1: 505-7 (doc. 401). 9 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 1: 507 (doc. 401). 10 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 1: 507-8 (doc. 401). For a surviving printed copy of the public notice see AN/TT (Arquivos Nacionais—Torre do Tombo, Lisbon), Gaveta 10, maço 5, doc. 27. See also Ch. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825 (New York: Knopf, 1969), 22.
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between Christians and non-Christians, contacts which could potentially result in spiritual pollution or corruption. The Bull expressly permitted the king of Portugal, the Infante D. Henrique, and persons authorized by them, to associate with Muslims and pagans as long as trade in prohibited goods was not involved. The justification was that the Pope could trust the above mentioned parties that their primary motive was to advance the interests of God, whereas others might seek only fast profit or even supply weapons or iron to the Infidels.11 The two key arguments of the Romanus Pontifex, just reward and authorization to associate with non-Christians, provided the Crown with a rock-solid base from which to regulate the African enterprise to its greatest advantage. All subsequent royal legislation stressed the Crown’s sole right to govern the modalities of contact with Africa, in order to maximize its revenue advantages. Violators of the royal decrees faced severe penalties. Secular punishments could be very heavy. While in the 1440s interloping in West Africa was punishable only by confiscation of property, with the Romanus Pontifex it became a capital crime, sometimes punishable by burning at the stake. The bull itself only threatened offenders with excommunication but made it clear the church was willing to lift the spiritual penalty if they settled with the Crown.12 Nevertheless, the full implications of Bull provided the secular arm of the law with an avenue to invoke a spiritual offence ultimately punishable by burning at the stake. In at least one known instance, this punishment was applied before the codification of the scales of interloping punishments in 1474. An interloper, caught by Diogo Gomes off the Senegalese coast in 1460, was publicly tortured on the wheel and burned in Lisbon, together with the gold he purchased in Africa and the swords he tried to sell, against papal prohibition.13 The 1474 decree became the first law regulating the West African trade to include a penal scale. Direct or indirect participation in the West African trade, unauthorized raiding in West Africa, and piracy against the legitimate traffic were all offenses punishable by death and loss of all property to the Crown. Ship captains guilty
11
Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 1: 505 and 507 (doc. 401). Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 1: 507 ( doc. 401). 13 J. M. Garcia, ed., As viagens dos descobrimentos (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1983), 46-7. 12
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of false declaration or concealment of goods over one mark of silver in value were also to suffer capital punishment. Smuggling or consent to smuggle and a host of other fraud charges called for various fines and in many cases for banishment.14 By 1514, the punishments had become even stiffer. Capital punishment applied to a greater number of offenses. Unauthorized trading or raiding in Guinea and piracy against the legitimate traffic were still punishable by death and loss of property to the Crown. So was, however, smuggling of goods over the value of six marks of silver to Guinea. Anyone caught trading illicitly in Guinea in goods worth more than one mark of silver in local value was to be put to death.15 The stiffening of the penal scale reflected, ironically, both the practical difficulties the Crown experienced in enforcing its laws, and the legal strength of its proprietary claims.
Revenue-Generating Options The Crown had two basic strategic options to choose from in managing its business in Africa: direct or indirect participation, aimed at maximization of revenue benefits (fiscalism)16 and political objectives. These options permitted numerous combinations, decided by situational dynamics and policy oscillations (Table 1). Well into the first half of the sixteenth century, the Crown believed that direct involvement would generate more revenue, although indirect exploitation of the overseas enterprise clearly constituted a less risky and labour-intensive mode of revenue generation. It habitually reserved for itself trade with gold-exporting regions (Arguim and the Gold Coast). However, in the rest of Western Africa the Crown employed mostly indirect methods of revenue gathering.
14 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, vol. 3, 1461-1500 (Lisbon: Instituto da Alta Cultura, 1971), 154 (doc. 115). 15 António Brásio, ed., Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1958), 2: 79-92 (doc. 28). 16 For a concise definition of these concepts see Richard Bonney, “Introduction: The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200-1815,” in Richard Bonney, ed., The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200-1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4-5.
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favour of a more restricted policy, whether partial royal monopolies or monopolistic arrangements with private parties. The standing privileges of the Cape Verde Islanders notwithstanding, D. Afonso V leased, in 1469, exclusive rights to the West African trade to Fernão Gomes, a wealthy Lisbon merchant. The King reserved to himself specific commodities, in particular malagueta (grains of paradise), eventually compelling Gomes to negotiate a separate lease allowing him to trade the spice.20 The new Crown policy was far from consistent. In 1470 the King reaffirmed the licence system,21 de facto violating the Gomes contract. The ambiguities were resolved only in 1474 when the Crown Prince D. João assumed direct control over the African enterprise. The decree of 31 August 1474 prohibited all unlicensed traffic south of the Cape Bojador and reserved the right to profit from the trade with Atlantic Africa to the Crown or its designates. The decree forcefully reasserted the claim that the right to regulate contacts with Africa constituted a just reward for the royal services to God and Christianity and threatened transgressors with severe punishments.22 Its provisions were confirmed in 1481,23 and in principle reaffirmed in 1514.24 Although the assumption that a full monopoly was the most rewarding alternative formed the basic platform of the majority of the royal pronouncements on the early overseas ventures, the Crown attempted fully to impose such an option only briefly, in 15181520.25 Until then, it relied largely on regional and commodity monopolies, or on exclusive renewable contracts with private entrepreneurs. Hieronymus Münzer, a German humanist and diplomat writing in the early 1490s, claimed that the Portuguese King had a monopoly on every major Atlantic import and export commodity and that private parties were left to trade in parrots, monkeys and 20
Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 129-30 (doc. 97); João de Barros, Ásia de João de Barros. Dos feitos que os Portugueses fizeram no descobrimento e conquista dos mares e terras do Oriente. Primeira Decada (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda, 1988), 72. 21 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 86 (doc. 60). 22 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 153-4 (doc. 115). 23 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 220-2 (doc. 152). 24 Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 2: 71-3 (doc. 26) and 7992 (doc. 28). 25 Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 2: 71-3 (doc. 26) and 7992 (doc. 28).
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straw mats.26 The real picture was not so dismal. The Crown kept direct control above all over the main source of African gold, the Gold Coast and Arguim, a fortified trading station off the coast of Mauritania, which constituted an important link to the Saharan trade networks. All other areas could be rented out or licences could be purchased for them. Even the Arguim trading station was leased out several times before 1521.27 Certain key commodities were indeed reserved for the Crown. The decree of 1470 claimed that trade in melegueta, other spices, civet cats, and rhinoceros horns was reserved to the Crown from the very beginning of the trade, and added brasil wood and precious stones to the list.28 In 1480, the same restrictions were placed on hanbels (voluminous Moroccan outer clothing)29 and conchas, red shells from the Canaries, because of their importance in the Gold Coast trade.30 In March of 1514, the Crown summarily prohibited trade in all goods sold on the Gold Coast, and outlawed the export of such commodities to the Cape Verde Islands.31 The penal code issued in June of 1514 proclaimed that private traders could deal only in merchandise and areas specified in the respective licence or contract.32 However, only one commodity required a special additional licence: civet cats, a source of valuable musk for perfume production.33 The severity of this decree was further blunted by the availability of special licences and contractual exemptions, or simply through the lack of enforcement.34 The Crown also used its legislative power to insert itself as a compulsory middleman. Thus Fernão Gomes’ contract demanded that he sell all his ivory to the Crown,35 as opposed to disposing 26 Münzer, “Itinerarium,” in Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 1: 244-5 (doc. 31). 27 Viagens de Luís de Cadamosto e de Pedro da Sintra (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa da História, 1948), 17-8; AN/TT, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, liv. 9, fol. 96r; AN/TT, Corpo Cronológico, parte I, maço 58, doc. 155. 28 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 86 (doc. 60). 29 AN/TT, Leis, maço 1, docs. 144 and 185. 30 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 214-5 (doc. 147). 31 Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 2: 71-3 (doc. 26). 32 Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 2: 81 (doc. 28). These provisions were later incorporated into the Ordenações Manuelinas 33 Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 2: 90 (doc. 28). 34 Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 2: 90 (doc. 28). 35 Barros, Ásia. Primeira Decada, 72.
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of it on the open market. The São Tomé charters of 1485 and 1493 compelled the settlers to purchase all their manilhas (heavy brass or copper bracelets), an essential European export to West Africa, from the Crown (whether in São Jorge da Mina or in Lisbon). They further ordered the settlers to sell all malagueta, tailed pepper, and slaves to the Crown agencies for a fixed price well below the market value.36 These requirements significantly delayed the progress of São Tomé settlement and, although they were significantly softened in 1500, continued to have negative impact on the supply of slaves to São Jorge da Mina.37 Measures such as these, in combination with the Crown’s repeated changes of policy, caused severe shocks both to the traffic itself and to its administration. In the early 1470s, for example, the partial retraction of the Cape Verdian trading privileges and the imposition of the Gomes contract resulted not only in a sharp formal protest from the povo (third estate) in the 1473 Cortes but in near chaos, smuggling, and piracy in Africa, because even those who would have normally purchased a license resorted to interloping.38 In the late 1510s, the Crown almost destroyed the rapidly expanding slave trade with Upper Guinea by first requiring the Cape Verde Islanders to trade only in locally produced commodities and, a year later, forbidding them to buy slaves for export.39 The law of 1518 reserved the Guinea trade for the Crown alone. As a result, the Upper Guinea slave trade declined from c. 2,000 to 80 slaves per annum, forcing the Crown to revoked the restrictions shortly after 1520.40 These measures, in particular those introduced in the early sixteenth century, were based exclusively on the desire to maximize Crown profit by preventing competition from private participants and by monopolizing what appeared to be, under a given set of circumstances, a well-established, lucrative market. Direct Crown
36
Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 207 (doc. 200) and 428-9 (doc. 289). 37 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 587-8 (doc. 361). 38 The hardening of punishments for interloping and smuggling in the law of 1474 demonstrates the Crown’s anxiety to master the situation. Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 153-4 (doc. 115). 39 Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 2: 139-50 (docs. 43, 44, 45 and 47). 40 See Ivana Elbl, “The Volume of the Early Atlantic Slave Trade, 14501521,” Journal of African History 38 (1997): 52 and 69.
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control was as a rule imposed on those commodities or in such regions and periods that happened to show remarkable growth or profit ratios. The jealously maintained and enforced monopoly on the Gold Coast trade is a prime example of this approach.
Problems of Direct Control The direct participation strategy frequently backfired because the Crown would overextend its resources and lose ability to act effectively, not to mention a loss of enforcement capability. Despite its political power, the Crown experienced problems faced by all large-scale medieval entrepreneurs engaged in complex ventures over large distances. These included daunting logistics, imperfect information, slow turnover, hard-to-control transaction costs, and agency problems. In addition, the Crown had to address far too many diverse concerns to give its overseas ventures the necessary and timely attention, or to view profit in strictly economic terms. The organizational structure of the royal West African enterprise emerged only gradually out of the general mechanism or the royal fazenda. In the 1440s and early 1450s, the Crown relied on shipborne expeditions administered through the Casa da Ceuta. The death of Prince Henry in 1460 brought the dual control of the West African trade to an end, and the Crown came into possession of its first shore-based West African outpost, Arguim. In the 1460s the West African enterprise graduated to the status of a special subdivision of the royal estate, as fazenda de Guiné.41 The Lisbon office, established already in 1455, assumed a central, but not exclusive role in administering the West African ventures, and became eventually known as the Guinea House (Casa de Guiné) or, later, Casa de Guiné e Mina.42 D. João and D. Manuel hoped the Guinea House 41
António J. Dias Dinis, Monumenta Henricina (Coimbra: Comissão Executive das Comemorações do V Centenário da Morte do Infante D. Henrique, 1973), 14: 280 (doc. 117). 42 The name Casa de Guiné appears first in 1481, in a letter of quittance covering the period 1476-1481 (AN/TT, Chancelaria de D. João II, liv. 1, fols. 53r-53v). However, the name of the agency varied. The older name trautos de Guiné that was in use since 1455 survived into the sixteenth century. Since the 1480s, the most commonly used name of the agency was Casa da Mina e trautos de Guiné (see for example Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 333-4 (doc. 217)). In some instances, the term “nossos trautos de Guiné” or
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would be able to handle both the Crown’s direct participation in the enterprise and the indirect revenues from it. This was not the case: merchandise continued to be cleared through regional customs and tax-collecting agencies (alfândegas and almoxarifados), despite orders to the contrary. The Guinea House was complemented by three satellite metropolitan agencies, the Casa dos Escravos, the Feitoria das Ilhas, and the Arsenal (Armazém), and by agencies located overseas, such as the North African factories, Arguim, and São Jorge da Mina. After the opening of the sea route to India, Asian trade was added to the official mandate of the factor of the Guinea House. The resulting workload was overwhelming. D. Manuel was forced to reform the system in 1509 by dividing the agency into two separate Houses, the Guinea House and the India House. The reform, however, was only partial. Both Houses still shared a single factor as chief executive responsible for all key decisions.43 As a result, the central agency was beset with inefficiencies which led to serious bottlenecks and slowdowns in turnover. The problem was rendered worse by the fact that the overseas agencies were responsible not to the factor of the Guinea House but directly to the King, whose authorization was required in even the simplest matters. The Guinea House acted only as a logistic and clearance center. The factor was responsible not only for its smooth operation and for enforcing royal instructions, but also for market research. It was his duty to collect up-to-date information on different trading regions in West Africa, and to make recommendations whether they should be rented out or administered directly by the Crown.44 At the beginning of each year, six months ahead of the next trading cycle, he prepared a list of supplies and merchandise needed for the African and, later, also Indian trade, so that his superiors, the vedores, superintendents of the royal fazenda could approve the list and orders could be placed. In urgent “nossos trautos e resgates de Guiné” were used, though obviously referring to the same agency (see Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 2: 339 (doc. 222) and 348-9 (docs. 231 and 232); AN/TT, Chancelaria de D. João II, liv. 20, fols. 11r and 114r). The fluid and somewhat confusing nomenclature has led historians to believe that the central agency was effectively established in Lisbon only after 1481 (see for instance Nunes Dias, Capitalismo monárquico português, 2: 190-1). 43 See Damião Peres, ed., Regimento das Cazas das Indias e Mina (Coimbra: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, 1947). 44 Peres, Regimento, 6-7, 25-26.
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situations, he could request an authorization to make interim purchases.45 The supply process was time-consuming and inevitably placed a lag of as much as two years between African demand and its satisfaction. This was one of key problems characterizing the royal enterprise: by the time the goods arrived at their destination in Africa, the opportunities were often gone. Crown agencies were unable to react flexibly to the African demand, neither in terms of selection and quantity of the merchandise, nor in those of quality and logistical support. The Crown was unable to provide adequate merchandise or facilities even to the gold-producing Mina factory, the main focus of its entrepreneurial attention. The officials at São Jorge da Mina perennially complained about the poor state of the warehouses, the low quality of the merchandise, and the damage that it usually sustained on its way from Portugal.46 The factory facilities, built together with the fortress in 1482, were unsatisfactory from the very beginning, but in 1503 the factor of Mina still lobbied the King to order the construction of a larger factory suitable for the proper storing and display of textiles. It was not a logistical problem, as the factor pointed out to the king. Material and transport were both available; only a royal order was required. Meanwhile, cloths kept rotting unsold, and soon became unsaleable, to the king’s great loss.47 In 1510, the Guinea House found itself unable to fill an order for painted hanbels and large basins desperately needed in Mina, despite the king’s repeated and specific orders.48 Shortages of manilhas, one of the key Portuguese exports to the Gold Coast, occurred several times during the early 1500s, and hurt the trade so much that the King ordered the Guinea House to keep 100,000 manilhas in stock at all times,49 with doubtful results. In 1513 the factory was left completely deprived of suitable merchandise, because the supply ship failed to arrive. Trade was brought to a standstill. The older textiles from previous shipments
45
Peres, Regimento, 6-7. See for example AN/TT, Corpo Cronológico, parte I, maço 3, doc. 119 and maço 4, doc. 42; AN/TT, Gaveta 15, maço 1, doc. 14. 47 AN/TT, Corpo Cronológico, parte I, maço 4, doc. 42. 48 AN/TT, Gaveta 15, maço 1, doc. 14. 49 Peres, Regimento, 8. 46
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had to be placed in the second-hand cloth factory and sold off at a discount, and about 700 hanbels were lost this way.50 The Arguim factory, which was only of secondary importance to the Crown, was much worse off than Mina. Supply ships only arrived three or four times a year.51 Little effort was made to make attractive and fresh merchandise available during the first half of the year, when most of the trading took place.52 Shortages of brass and mastic cost the Crown much gold in missed opportunities, and damaged the factory’s reputation, thus further hurting the trade.53 To the amazement and indignation of the Berber merchants, in 1509 the factor of Arguim found himself unable for two years to get from Portugal a special order delivery of merchandise paid for with a large quantity of gold, despite complaints and appeals to the King.54 The supply of victuals was an even more nagging problem. Each year, the summer brought a period of hunger to the Arguim fort.55 The factors faced chronic difficulties in securing transport to Portugal for the slaves they bought, or even enough casks to supply them with water. In 1509, many slaves starved while awaiting embarkation and, subsequently, en route to Portugal.56 The extent of the problems faced by Arguim officials is well reflected in the 1515 exchange of letters between Estevão Vaz, the factor of the Guinea House, and the secretary of state who acted as the King’s representative. Vaz informed the secretary that the small caravel servicing Arguim arrived in Lisbon with slaves and that it brought an urgent request for merchandise and food supplies. Vaz urged the secretary to send the vessel back immediately with merchandise, as an emergency measure, because a large ship able to carry grain would take too long to get ready and would first have to be requisitioned, probably from the Arsenal. It proved impossible for months on end, however, to make even a small vessel with emergency supplies ready to sail. The merchandise it was to carry remained to be ordered 50
AN/TT, Corpo Cronológico, parte I, maço 13, doc. 48. AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 888, fols. 172r-177r. 52 AN/TT, Gaveta 20, maço 2, doc. 67 and maço 5, doc. 42. 53 AN/TT, Gaveta 20, maço 5, doc. 42. 54 AN/TT, Gaveta 20, maço 5, doc. 42. 55 In the summer, wheat rations decreased significantly both for the garrison and slaves. AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 888, fos. 55-59. See also AN/TT, Gaveta 20, maço 5, doc. 42. 56 AN/TT, Gaveta 20, maço 5, doc. 42. 51
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from Flanders and other places abroad,57 and even under the best of conditions, a return trip to Flanders took a couple of months.58 It does not call for much imagination to picture how much time was required to process an order lacking urgency. The policy of micro-management and tight control over Crown employees and agents59 made it difficult to respond to the local demand and opportunities in a timely fashion. The conduct of trade was regulated by exceedingly detailed sets of binding instructions (regimentos) and price lists (taixas).60 On-the-spot initiative not only went mostly unrewarded but was often punished, either directly or through administrative chicanery, as demonstrated in the misfortunes of Francisco de Almada, the royal factor in Arguim from 1508 to 1511. Almeida sharply increased the supply of slaves to Arguim by fostering relations with mainland suppliers but ran into trouble because of disbursing unauthorized grain rations to feed the human merchandise. It took him eight year to clear his standing with the Crown.61 Almada’s predecessor, Gonçalo de Fonseca, received a 57
AN/TT, Gaveta 20, maço 2, doc. 67. A. H. de Oliveira Marques, Hansa e Portugal na Idade Media (Lisbon, Tipografia Albano Tomas dos Anjos, 1959), 79. 59 All Crown agencies laboured in an environment of suspicion and distrust. The elaborate security measures included ship and personal searches, as well as complicated control of access to money chests, and an accounting system which was almost entirely geared towards inventory control, ending with a full audit of each ranking employee at the end of his turn of duty. See Peres, Regimento, 6-7, 8-9, 11-15, 23-4, 26-9, 89-80, 95. For documentary evidence pertaining to concrete situations see, for example, AN/TT, Corpo Cronológico, parte I, maço 8, doc. 72 (unauthorized trading during unloading); AN/TT, Corpo Cronológico, parte I, maço 17, doc. 4 (complaints about the transfer of goods between royal pilots and the officials of São Jorge da Mina; Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 2: 86-87 (doc. 28). See also See for example Brásio, Monumenta Missionária Africana, 2a série, 2: 89 (doc. 28); AN/TT, Corpo Cronológico, parte II, maço 50, doc. 22 (the record of the trial of a royal official, António Froes, filled with accusations and counteraccusations). 60 For examples of ships’ regimentos see A. Teixeira da Mota, “A viagem do navio ‘Santiago’ a Serra Leoa e Rio de S. Domingos in 1526 (Livro de Armação),” Boletim Cultural de Guiné Portuguesa 24 (1969): 562-7; Alan F. C. Ryder, “An Early Portuguese Trading Voyage to the Forcados River,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 1 (1959): 301-5; A. Teixeira da Mota and R. Mauny, “Livre de l’armement du navire São Miguel de l’île de São Thomé au Benin (1522),” Bulletin de l’IFAN, sér. B, 40 (1979): 68-71. 61 See Anselmo Braacamp Freire, “Cartas de quitação del Rei D. Manuel,” Archivo Histórico Portuguez 2: 354 (doc. 237). AN/TT, Corpo Cronológico, parte 58
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clearance of his accounts only in 1522, fourteen years after his term had ended, because he sold some of the merchandise confiscated from a captured Genoese interloper, Miguel Pardo, together with the Crown goods without first consulting Lisbon and obtaining a proper clearance.62 Fonseca was reproached and Pardo’s best goods were left to rot in the warehouse until they were finally incorporated into the factory’s inventory several years later.63 Because they were not on the Arguim price list (taixa), none of the Arguim officials would take the risk of touching them without explicit orders. The commander of the ship that captured Pardo was theoretically entitled to a half of the cargo, but he died before the prize case was cleared, and his heiress finally received only a half of the expected sum. The rest was deducted, however ridiculous it may sound, as payment for the Crown’s mediation in selling the merchandise.64 The Crown was aware of its inability to compete with private participants on the open market. As long as it believed, as it did during the Joanine and Manueline period, that direct trade was easier to administer and potentially more profitable than collecting revenues from a multitude of participants, it routinely resorted to legislation to preserve for itself access to trade in more profitable commodities or trade with more promising regions. The officials of the Guinea House were instructed not only to watch the royal market, but also to inspect the ledgers of private merchants newly returned from Africa in order to recommend which parts of the West African trade should remain open, which should be placed under an exclusive contract and for how much, and which should be reserved for the Crown. Each year, the Crown would be presented with an estimate of the revenues expected to come from a particular sector of its overseas enterprise. The figures usually reflected the amount of taxes and customs that trade with those regions would yield in a particular year.65 The Crown, under the impression that if it took over directly a promising part of the trade it would be able to achieve four times I, maço 12, doc. 8. 62 Freire, “Cartas,” 8: 400-1 (doc. 642). 63 See the inventories from 1511 and 1514 (AN/TT, Corpo Cronológico, parte II, maço 27, doc. 70 and maço 49, doc. 101). 64 AN/TT, Corpo Cronológico, parte I, maço 16, doc. 94. 65 Peres, Regimento, 25-6.
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as much revenue, often dealt severe blows both to the trade with West Africa and to its own revenues. The most obvious example was the attempted take-over of the flourishing slave trade on the Upper Guinea Coast in 1517-1522. The Crown, claiming that the Cape Verde settlers caused major damage to its proveito e serviço (profit and service) by competing vigorously, and to that section of the trade in general because they offered the Africans better terms than the Crown expeditions, prohibited most of the trade between the Cape Verde Islands and Upper Guinea.66 Revenues plummeted as a result, and the Crown was forced to reverse its policy before 1525, but this and similar instances tended to undermine private confidence in the safety of investing in West African ventures. In the course of the sixteenth century, the Crown came to see leasing and contracting out as more advantageous that direct participation, and eventually made all aspects of its African enterprise available to interested parties with enough capital to provide large sums up-front, or to those in need of rewards for services rendered. Leasing and tax farming came to be definitely preferred over a system of individual licences, often too dispersed to be managed effectively. Theoretically, the leaseholders (trautadores) had an unlimited right to trade in the leased region, to take partners, and to issue licences to other traders in the name of the Crown. The Crown promised not to send its ships to such areas, and not to licence access for other private traders.67 The leaseholders paid the Crown either a fixed annual fee, or a share of imported African goods.68 The Crown, however, seldom refrained from involvement in the leased-out areas and used general regulations limiting traffic in certain goods to extract extra payments.69 D. Henrique initiated this type of policy when he rented out the Arguim trade to a group of entrepreneurs for ten years around
66
Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 139-50 (docs. 43, 44, 45, and 47. 67 For a typical contract see AN/TT, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, liv. 33, fos. 46v-47. 68 The original 1474-1479 contract on the coast from Pedra de Galee to Cape Bojador called for one sixth of all imports (AN/TT, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, liv. 33, fols. 46v-47r). It was renegotiated in 1475 in favour of yearly payments of 28,000 réis (AN/TT, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, liv. 30, fol. 132r). For other payments in specie see below. 69 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 129 (doc. 97).
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1455. The leaseholders were responsible for maintaining the fortress.70 Arguim was still under lease in 1463, when the royal collectors of revenue from Arguim, resident in Lagos, were stripped of their offices for mismanagement and replaced by a Lisbon treasurer.71 These actions indicated that the Crown intended to pursue a similar approach in the near future. In 1469, the entire Guinea trade was leased to Fernão Gomes for five years, for an annual fee of 200,000 réis.72 The rent was relatively low considering that twenty-five slaves would have covered it.73 Yet in 1473 Gomes still owed most of the rent,74 despite the fact that in 1472 the Crown exempted him from all taxes except a sisa on the sales of malagueta,75 waived all standing regulations in favour of his privileges,76 and had lent him a round ship to carry on the traffic in 1471.77 Undeterred, the Crown renewed the contract in 1473, although it imposed an additional fee of 100,000 réis on the malagueta trade, raising the total rent to 300,000 réis.78 The malagueta fee, however, did not apply retroactively to the previous years. Gomes’ general contract was terminated in 1474, but he still remained in control of the Arguim trade, probably for five more years.79 Bartolomeu Marchione, a Florentine merchant resident in Lisbon and a naturalized Portuguese subject,80 held a lease on the Niger Delta (Rios dos Escravos) between1486 and 1495. The fee was set at 1,100,000 réis annually.81 The size of the fee indicates that Marchione was entitled to trade not only in the Niger Delta but also in the rest of West Africa. In the subsequent years the lease on the Slave Rivers were much less than Marchione paid,82 and most of the 70
Viagens de Luís de Cadamosto, 17. AN/TT, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, liv. 9, fol. 96r. 72 Barros, Ásia. Primeira Decada, 72. 73 In this period, a prime slave freshly arrived from West African coast sold for 8,000 réis. The calculation is 200,000 réis : 8,000 réis = 25. 74 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 129 (doc. 97). 75 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 112-3 (doc. 83). 76 AN/TT, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, liv. 33, fol. 141r. 77 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 90-1 (doc. 65). 78 Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 129-30 (doc. 97). 79 AN/TT, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, liv. 33, fols. 46v-47r. 80 AN/TT, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, liv. 30, fol. 68r. 81 Freire, “Cartas,” 3: 477-8 (doc. 404). 82 In 1502-1503 the yearly rent was 800,000 réis (Freire, “Cartas,” 2: 239-40 (doc. 220)). 71
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slaves that he imported to Portugal and sold to his associate, Cesare de Barchi, in the 1490s, were Wolof. Only a very small fraction came from the Niger Delta.83 Marchione could, however, have sold slaves from this part of West Africa in Mina. His original contract was for six years, but it was renewed for 1492-1495. Marchione made his payments to the almoxarife of the Slave House in Lisbon, and on the whole proved much more dependable than Fernão Gomes. He paid regularly, and when his contract was renewed he made an advance payment covering two-thirds of the total fee.84 Later on he invested heavily in voyages to India and in the spice trade.85 In 1504-1505, his payments to the Crown rose to 64,158, 968 réis. In 1507-1510 his activity expanded, but he proved unable to sell all the spices received from the Crown, and as late as 1514 he still owed the Crown 36,640,355 réis, of which 16,514,297 represented several malagueta shipments.86 Malagueta, one the most expensive spices in the late medieval period, was not selling very well in the early sixteenth century. In 1512 Calliro Redolho leased the entire malagueta trade for two years for a more realistic annual sum of 1,050,400 réis.87 Leasing became routine in the 1500s and 1510s.88 Arguim was farmed out in 1515-l516, after almost forty years of direct Crown administration.89 The Senegal River zone was rented out in 15111512 for 393,900 réis, payable in two instalments, in June 1511 and January 1512.90 The amount due in 1511 was 195,000 réis.91 Cantor and the Gambia River were leased to Mestre Felipe, a Jew, for a period running from St. John’s Day (June 24) of 1510 to St. John’s Day of 1514, for 1,363,500 réis, of which he paid 450,000 in 1511. The payments were due after the arrival of the ships and after 83 Vicenta Cortés, La esclavitud en Valencia durante el reinado de los Reyes Católicos (1479-1516) (Valencia: Excmo. Ayuntamiento, 1964), 217-471. For the link with Cesare di Barchi see year 1497. 84 Freire, “Cartas,” 3: 477-8 (doc. 404). 85 Nunes Dias, O capitalismo monárquico português, 1: 360-1, 86 Freire, “Cartas,” 1: 360-2 (docs. 109 and 110). 87 Freire, “Cartas,” 2: 441 (doc. 247). 88 Peres, Regimento, 25-6, 30, 50. 89 AN/TT, Corpo Cronológico, parte II, maço 58, doc. 155. It was also leased in 1525, for the staggering sum of 4,000,000 réis (AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 590, fol. 58r). 90 Freire, “Cartas,” 2: 440-1 (doc. 297). 91 AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 532, fol. 105r.
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allowing for expenditures.92 Guinea Rivers, the area between Gambia and Sierra Leone, were leased for three years, from 24 June 1509 to 24 June 1512. Over this period, 195,000 réis were paid in 15091510; 911,666 réis in 1511; and 1,376,620 in 1512.93 The annual lease amounted to 917,747 réis, and over the subsequent two years, covered by a contract in favour of Joham de Lila and his partners, it rose to 1,212,000 réis.94 Sierra Leone was leased prior to 1502 for 600,000 réis to Pero de Evora, and before that for 640,000 réis to another leaseholder. António Fernandes, one of the past leaseholders, remained owing 84,600 réis.95 In 1510-1513 the lease dropped to about 540,000 réis annually.96 The Slave Rivers were leased in 1486-1495 for 1,100,000 réis,97 and in 1502-1503 for 800,000 réis yearly.98 Rio Primeiro, east of the Lagos Lagoon, was rented separately for 140,000 réis per year.99 Tax farming was probably less risky for the Crown than leasing, and was based on extensive precedent. Throughout the late Middle Ages, the Portuguese Crown, in accordance with general European practice, allowed most of its tax and customs revenue to be farmed out, and this policy eventually came to cover those Lisbon agencies which dealt with revenue from West Africa. Of these, the Slave House was particularly relevant because its head acted as receiver of most African regional and commodity rents. In 1509-1510 the Slave House was farmed out for 6,383,624 réis, or 3,191,812 réis yearly.100 Forty years later, in 1552 the annual rate was only slightly higher, standing at 3,400,000 réis.101 The Vintena House was farmed out in 1509-1510 for 3,884,275 réis, or 1,942,137 réis annually.102
92
Freire, “Cartas,” 2: 440-1 (doc. 297); AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 532, fol.
108r, 93 Freire, “Cartas,” 3: 472-3 (doc. 392); AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 532, fol. 112r; Freire, “Cartas,” 2: 441 (doc. 297). 94 Freire, “Cartas,” 2: 441 (doc. 297). 95 Freire, “Cartas,” 1: 243 (doc. 44). 96 Freire, “Cartas,” 2: 441 (doc. 297). 97 Freire, “Cartas,” 3: 477-8 (doc. 404). 98 Freire, “Cartas,” 2: 239 (doc. 220). 99 Freire, “Cartas,” 2: 239 (doc. 220). 100 Freire, “Cartas,” 3: 392 (doc. 370). 101 João Brandão, Grandeza e abastança de Lisboa em 1552, edited by José da Felicidade Alves (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1990), 59. 102 Freire, “Cartas,” 3: 472-3 ( doc. 392).
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The West African Islands represented a very attractive target for tax farmers. The revenue of the Cape Verde Islands, namely Santiago and Fogo, was farmed out to Duarte Rodriguez Pinto and Pedro Francisco for three years in 1504. They undertook to pay 2,100,000 réis during that period, one third being delivered in advance as security.103 This amounted to an annual rent of 700,000 réis, and the sum increased to 900,000 réis yearly in 1510, when António Rodrigues farmed the revenue of Santiago, Maio, and Fogo for three years.104 In accordance with the provisions of the contract the amount, payable in slaves evaluated by the royal almoxarife, was later on further raised to 1,033,333 réis yearly.105 António Rodrigues joined in partnership with Nicolão Rodriguez, and by the end of their contract they had paid the Crown 3,130,999 réis.106 The revenues were promptly farmed again, this time to Jorge Nunez, who held the contract until 1515.107 Graviel Rodriguez was the farmer in 1519-1521, when the Crown’s repression of private trade reached its height.108 In 1525, the revenue increased again, and was farmed out for 1,200,000 réis.109 The revenue of São Tomé was farmed out in 1509 to Diogo Fernandes Cabral, and in 1510 to Joham de Fomseca and António Carneiro for the sum of 388,800 réis.110 Joham de Fomseca continued farming the São Tomé revenues in 1511-1513, for a bulk payment of 535,500 réis. The revenues of Príncipe were farmed out in 1510-1514 to António Carneiro for 535,500 réis,111 of which he paid 150,000 réis in 1511.112 The Ano Bom Island was a trading backwater, but it was still worth to Duarte Afonso and Duarte Bello, farming its vintena, some 70,130 réis during an unspecified period ending in 1513.113
103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113
AN/TT, Corpo Cronológico, parte II, maço 8, doc. 104. AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 532, fol. 100r. Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 2: 41-5 (doc. 15). Freire, “Cartas,” 2: 441 (doc. 297). AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 532, fols. 90v, 97r. Freire, “Cartas,” 10: 4 (doc. 764). AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 590, fol. 58r. Freire, “Cartas,” 3: 392 (doc. 370). Freire, “Cartas,” 2: 440-1 (doc. 297). AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 532, fol. 116r. Freire, “Cartas,” 2: 441 (doc. 297).
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In 1514 António Carneiro signed a four-year contract with the Crown, binding him to supply Mina with slaves from Benin in return for two thirds of the price of each slave sold in Mina, and a monopoly on the Niger Delta trade. This provision violated the privileges of the São Tomeans, who ignored it when they could not bypass it legally. São Tomé had been a slave supplier to Mina since it was populated in the 1490s. D. Manuel’s administration tried to assure itself of a guaranteed supply in the early 1500s, and instead of depending on the open market it signed a partnership agreement with Fernão de Melo, captain of São Tomé, under which the Crown supplied merchandise and Melo the necessary logistics in return for a share in the sales in Mina. Melo, however, did not have a monopoly on the supply. Carneiro’s monopoly contract was an exception in this respect, which was not repeated when a slave supply contract was signed with Duarte Bello in 1519 and João de Odon in 1525.114 The frequent changes in Crown policy and strategy reflect the difficulties presented by the logistical and administrative demands of a complex long-distance enterprise. The gradual move away from direct control of many of the African ventures reflects the hard lessons of the “capitalismo monárquico” (almost certainly a misnomer). The shift in revenue-collecting strategy in favour of guaranteed income was a result of a continual reassessment of Crown options, and an example of ongoing adaptation of past lessons from the management of royal domains and other revenues to the conditions presented by far-flung overseas enterprises. The Results While modern historians tend to be much more complimentary,115 contemporaries often criticized the Crown’s business decisions as ill thought-out or even irrational when it came to profit or income maximization. The third estate (o povo), in protest against the Gomes contract, argued in the 1473 Cortes that the Crown could derive as much as 100,000 cruzados (39,000,000 réis) in revenues from the 114 John L. Vogt, “The Early São Thomé-Principe Slave Trade with Mina, 1500-1540,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6 (1973): 456-7. 115 Vogt, for example, praised the Crown’s West African enterprise as a “remarkable coordination effort” (John L.Vogt, The Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 1469-1682 (Athens: University of Georgia Press), 72-73)).
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African trade if it was kept open.116 Since the Crown dues, which this sum represented, constituted 28.5% of the overall projected value of the trade, the Cortes believed the trade worth at least 120,000,000 réis only three decades after its opening phase. Given the fact that the Gomes contract came to only 300,000 réis annually, the povo certainly seemed to have a point here, well beyond mere self-interest. The Crown tended to voice only one kind of response to these and later protests by disgruntled subjects who pointed out that Crown policies were damaging to the latter’s own interests— invoking the royal prerogative to decide what was to the proveito (benefit/good) of the kingdom at large, in other words invoking what amounted to executive privilege.117 It is important to realize that the Crown’s idea of “profit” was not necessarily based on accounting principles. In contemporary usage the word proveito (“profit”) meant both “benefit” and “profit” in a bookkeeping sense. Like other medieval political bodies, the Crown had to consider both non-economic goals and the costs of revenue generation. Thus transaction costs were one of the key considerations the Crown kept in mind in its continual reassessment of overseas revenue sources. The licencing system and customs network represented a considerable burden for the royal bureaucracy, just as the collection of various taxes, tolls and dues did in the metropolitan area. In the fifteenth century, farming out tax collection and contracting out regalian rights were time-sanctioned, panEuropean methods of reducing overhead and securing a guaranteed, fixed income, even if it was lower that the potential overall revenue.118 It therefore does not come as a surprise that the Crown, 116
Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 1: doc. 68. Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 2a série, 1: doc. 68. 118 For a series of studies on medieval and sixteenth-century revenue collection methods and taxation strategies see the conceptually fundamental volume edited by Richard Bonney, The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, in particular Bonney’s “Introduction” (1-17); also see Philippe Contamine, Jean Kerhervé, and Albert Rigaudière, eds., L’impôt au Moyen Âge. L’impôt public et le prélèvement seigneurial, fin XIIe-début XVIe siècle, 3 vols (Paris: Comité pour l’Histoire Économique et Financiére de la France, 2002); J.-Ph. Genet and M. Le Mené. eds., Genèse de l’état moderne. Prélèvement et redistribution (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1987); For a general development of revenue administration in the West, since the Antiquity to modernity, see Carolyn Webber and Aaron Wildawsky, A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), particularly chapters 4 and 5. 117
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like its European counterparts, showed a marked preference for dealing with a small number of large entrepreneurs, rather than with the public in general. This approach increased predictability, focussed the eventual application of sanctions and deterrents, simplified bargaining, and thus lowered the Crown’s transactions costs, albeit at the price of potentially lowering the income. The puzzling element in the early period of the Portuguese expansion is, in fact, precisely the one that has often been characterized as a progressive feature, namely the Crown’s insistence on direct participation in commercial operations as the preferred option. One possible explanation may lie in the fact that its administrative and accounting practices left the Crown in no position to determine efficiently how much profit (proveito) it was in fact deriving from the West African enterprises, beyond a well-justified but useless notion that the revenue was considerable. The Crown’s accounting system was geared towards inventory and agent control, not towards cost-benefit analysis or revenue-expense reconciliation. In essence, the Crown treated the African income the same way it treated its overall revenues: as a giant petty-cash box, from which money and goods were drawn as needed. The King drew on the Guinea House randomly and haphazardly to cover purchases for the royal household or to transfer money to other administrative departments which stood in need of a cash injection. Some of the merchandise arriving from West Africa was not even put on the market, but distributed in the form of presents— —a thoroughly medieval and Renaissance form of largesse. In 1486-1493, for example, only one third of the slaves registered as received by the Slave House were actually sold, the rest being distributed as gifts and favours according to royal dispositions in the matter.119 In 1511, the entire Crown share in the proceeds of the Atlantic slave trade went toward covering the enormous cost of building fortifications in Morocco. The revenue derived from regional leases and tax farms, similarly to some 80 per cent of overall Crown revenues, was assigned to defray social payments to the nobility.120
119
Freire, “Cartas”, 3: 396-7 (doc. 380). AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 532, fols. 97r-121r, 190r. For the overall pattern, see Ivana Elbl, “Overseas Expansion, Nobility, and Social Mobility in the Age of Vasco de Gama,” Portuguese Studies Review 6 (1997-98): 53-80, in particular Figure 1, 67. 120
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The overseas expansion provided a valuable new source of rewards for powerful subjects or royal favourites, and thus constituted an important form of political and social capital. In this respect the Crown’s approach can be considered “economic” only if the concept is enlarged to include the application of formal economic thinking to social and ceremonial interaction— —something that, it must be stressed, was rather alien to the actors involved in such processes at the time. Grants in the Atlantic Islands and in Africa were one of the ways in which the Regency sought to pacify the restless ambitions of Infante D. Henrique during D. Afonso V’s minority, yet such grants also became an expression of the Infante’s political power once the King had come of age. After Henrique’s death, D. Afonso used overseas resources to offer boons to equally restless subjects, such as his brother D. Fernando and the celebrated D. Duarte de Meneses. In 1474, the African enterprise came under the direct administration of the Crown Prince, D. João, and its profits were assigned toward the maintenance of his household,121 establishing thus a precedent for subsequent heirs presumptive, D. Afonso and D. Manuel. In the 1510s, if not before, the revenues from various West African regions were merged into the pipeline of royal social payments to the nobility: assentamentos, tenças, and casamentos, becoming as inextricable a part of the system as the revenue from metropolitan fiscal districts.122 In 1511, the full amount of the assentamento of D. Manuel’s consort Queen Maria, amounting to 2,150,000 réis, drew on revenues of the Casa da Mina.123 At the same time, the African enterprise supported 45 per cent of the 4,460,000 réis to which amounted the assentamento of Queen Lenor, the widow of King João II and sister of the reigning King D. Manuel.124 The revenues from trade in malagueta (grains of paradise) covered the assentamento of the “Excellente Senhora,” D. Juana “La Beltraneja,” the daughter and heir of King Henrique IV, who lost her bid for the throne of Castile to Isabel the Catholic in 1474 but because of her betrothal to King Afonso V continued to be the financial responsibility of Portugal.125
121 122 123 124 125
Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 3: 153-4, doc. 115. AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 532, fols. 98r-121r. AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 532, fol. 176. AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 532, fols. 177-177v. AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 532, fol. 177v.
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The annual orçamentos (budget estimates) and the receipts of the Guinea House and its satellite agencies indicate that the West African enterprise contributed significantly to the royal income. In the 1473 orçamento, for example, the overall domestic revenue of the Crown was estimated at 52,168,500 réis and in the 1477 one at 43,074,000 réis.126 In this context, the 300,000 réis of the Gomes contract look rather insignificant. However, within two years of Prince D. João’s assumption of control over the African enterprise, the gross yearly revenues exceeded 13,000,000 réis.127 While nowhere near the 39,000,000 estimated by the 1473 Cortes, the potential of the trade was undeniable. Moreover, as Table 2 indicates, the gross revenues of the Guinea House registered very rapid growth in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Yet it is important to realize that these figures represent gross receipts, not net income. None of the operating expenses, or the overhead, had been deducted by the Crown.128 Since these raw figures were used for casting up the annual orçamentos, it is no surprise that the Crown was easily seduced into believing that its Guinea treasure chest was bottomless. The orçamentos are more reliable when the estimates are based on leases and tax farms, rather than Crown receipts, because those represent actual net income. Two of these orçamentos are available for the early sixteenth century, pertaining to 1511 and 1525. Both are incomplete but still comprehensive enough to be comparable. The 1511 orçamento indicates that African revenues accounted for 17 per cent of the Crown’s expected income, the rest coming from domestic sources.129 In 1525, domestic revenues declined to 68 per cent, but still formed the majority. Africa provided 16 per cent, India 14 per cent and the Azores 2 per cent (data for Madeira are missing).130 These figures suggest that Africa played an important role in the generation of royal revenues, but its share consistently
126
Jorge Faro, Receitas y despesas da Fazenda Real de 1384 a 1481 (subsídios documentais) (Lisbon: Instituto Nacional de Estatística, 1465), 82-5 and 225-9. 127 AN/TT, Chancelaria de D. João II, liv. 1, fols. 53r-53v. 128 For some of the problems of Portuguese revenue estimates in sixteenthcentury Asia see Subrahmanyam and Thomaz, “Evolution of Empire,” 312, 316. 129 AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 532, fols. 1r-118v. 130 AN/TT, Núcleo Antigo, no. 590, fols. 1r-98r, 111r.
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lagged behind metropolitan sources. The emphasis placed on overseas income, at the expense of domestic revenues, shows the importance of perception and impression: clearly, the overseas enterprise was perceived as the dynamic element. It was the gross intake (see Table 2), rather than net income, that dazzled contemporaries and modern historians alike.
Conclusion The West African enterprise, just like the overseas enterprise in general, constituted a windfall addition to the existing (and limited) resources of the Portuguese Crown. From an administrative and strategic point of view the Crown handled this sector in the same manner as it did its metropolitan resources: as a means of attaining the short-term goals of solidifying and expanding its power under very difficult and turbulent conditions. The Crown’s strategies were thus satisficing—they did not necessarily aim at maximizing revenue, but rather at achieving an acceptable and sustainable cash flow and securing means to satisfy political and social strategies. However, these strategies were deeply rooted in past practices and political choices (we might say that they were “path-dependent”) and can be best understood in the context of “domain state” fiscal system, as formulated by Bonney and Ormrod.131 This system grew out of medieval seigneurial estate and revenue management, an area that scholars have mostly neglected in their search for the roots of capitalist economy. The limitations characterizing the Portuguese royal enterprise in Africa, and the temporary barriers to private participation that the Crown erected in an effort to manage its short-term revenues had serious impact on the volume and regional development of early European trade with Africa. The relative volume of trade with various African regions is frequently seen as a reflection of their supply capacity and of effective demand for European merchandise. It is essential to realize, however, that the policies and strategies of the Portuguese Crown, as well as the inefficiencies of its various agencies, distorted the ability of African trading partners to sell and buy, both by limiting outsider access to African markets and by 131
Bonney, “Introduction,” 13.
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making the Crown unable to conduct such trade efficiently.132 It is particularly important to stress this in connection with the early Atlantic slave trade and the debate on the state of slave trade and slavery in the coastal regions of West Africa in the opening period of the European overseas expansion.133
132 For comparison, see John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 2 “The Development of Commerce between Europeans and Africans” (pp. 43-71); and George Brooks, Landlords and Strangers. Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), chaps. 7-9. 133 For an elaboration of this argument see Elbl, “The Volume of the Early Atlantic Slave Trade,” 74-5.
CIVIC DEBT, CIVIC TAXES, AND URBAN UNREST: A CATALAN KEY TO INTERPRETING THE LATE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPEAN CRISIS Jeffrey Fynn-Paul
This paper describes a phenomenon that has not received its due share of attention from historians writing on the European crisis of the later fourteenth century: the effect of unforeseen short- and long-term population loss on urban polities which had contracted fixed debt levels on the assumption that a steady level of urban taxes, usually consumption taxes, would be available to pay interest on that debt. The case study will be Catalonia, and especially the Catalan city of Manresa, but the principle deduced here can be applied to cities throughout Europe. To the mix must be added the effects of war, which during these decades was often protracted and desperate, and which demanded every surplus penny from combatants’ treasuries, especially since the price for failure on the battlefield was often a loss of sovereignty. By the 1340s, when a long-term cycle of plagues was inaugurated by the Black Death, European war was funded almost entirely though deficit financing. Since warfare was frequent and widespread in late fourteenth-century Europe, it often happened that cities would contract a debt burden at the utmost limit of their citizens’ ability to pay, only to have a wave of plague reduce the urban population by some significant amount during the repayment period. Since civic debt simply had to be paid in order for the financial machinery of the state not to fail, the taxes which paid this debt had to be sustained at a constant rate, resulting in an increased tax burden per capita. Since the taxes used to pay civic debts were often consumption taxes on such goods as meat, wine, and wheat, the increased burden was felt most keenly by the poor. This is not to say that the middle and upper classes in many cities were not severely harried, especially when it became clear that consumption taxes alone would not be enough to make the next round of interest payments. Squeezed, therefore, in a quadruple vise of depopulation, war, debt and taxation, urban householders throughout Europe were frequently in an untenable situation during the decades
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between 1350 and 1400. The persistent urban unrest which characterizes this period may often have arisen from precisely this combination of variables, as it did in Manresa during the 1360s and 1370s. The conclusion of this paper applies the theory derived from the Manresan evidence to some famous cases of urban unrest in Genoa, Florence, and Venice between 1350 and 1400.
The Development of Regular Tax Systems in the Catalan Cities, 1285-1330 In order to understand the effects of urban tax and debt systems on late fourteenth-century Catalan cities, it is necessary to describe the evolution and functions of these systems. Catalan urban institutions, both political and financial, were slow to coalesce into what might be called a typical late-medieval form. Although there had been experiments with systems of urban consellers in Catalonia during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, these were abandoned for somewhat mysterious reasons. It was not until 1274 that Barcelona received a definitive urban government of the type it would retain until the end of the ancien régime.1 As might be expected, the pace of innovation in the smaller Catalan cities tended to lag behind Barcelona, often by a period of decades. Manresa itself was a royal city by the late twelfth century, but as late as 1254 it was granted as a fief to Viscount Ramon Folc IV of Cardona for the duration of the viscount’s life. Ramon Folc survived until 1274, meaning that until that very late date Manresa was both a feudal possession and outside of the main stream of Catalan urban development. In 1276, however, the new King Pere II reorganized the Catalan administration system. Manresa and certain other towns now became the capitals of their own veguerias, which were large territorial administrative units similar in extent and function to English counties.2 1 Philip Daileader, “The Vanishing Consulates of Catalonia,” Speculum 74 (1999): 65-94; for Vic, see Paul Freedman, “An Unsuccessful Attempt at Urban Organization in Twelfth-Century Catalonia,” Speculum 54 (1979): 479-91; and also Paul Freedman, “Another Look at the Uprising of the Townsmen of Vic (1181-1183),” Acta Medievalia 20-21 (2000): 177-86. 2 For the creation of the Manresan vegueria, see Jeffrey Fynn-Paul, “The Catalan City of Manresa: A Political, Social, and Economic History,” PhD
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In 1291 King Jaume II ascended the throne, and his farsighted policies, implemented over the course of a long and pacific reign (d. 1327), did much to turn Manresa from a feudal market town into a thriving regional capital. In 1315, Jaume elevated Manresa from the status of villa (town), to that of civitas (city). More tangibly, in the same year Jaume also gave the Manresans permission to form a conciliar government. A third element of Jaume’s political policy was to purchase the town’s bailiwick from a noble family, the de Manresas, who had been exercising various forms of feudal dominance over the Manresan townspeople since the twelfth century.3 From 1315, few if any noblemen resided within Manresa’s city limits. Throughout the fourteenth century, no knights were elected to the office of consul. King Jaume had made Manresa into a bourgeois city. Jaume’s political reforms were complemented by equally farreaching fiscal innovations. In 1311, for example, the king granted Manresans a monopoly on intramural wine sales. This new monopoly represented a serious blow to the seigniors in the vicinity of Manresa, who lost their principal market, while the landowning patricians of the city were now in a position to charge a premium on their own vintages. The privilege was especially important to the city’s patricians because wine growing was a principal capital investment for them at this time.4 Another royal privilege of 1311 granted Manresans the right to collect taxes from everyone who owned property within the territory of Manresa.5 Also in this year, Jaume added a second fair to the city’s calendar, increasing its importance as a regional trade nexus.6 The principal aim of all this reform was, of course, to increase revenue. As part of the royal patrimony, Manresa owed a certain amount of money to the crown each year. Exactly how much this
Dissertation, University of Toronto (2006), 8-10. 3 Pere Català i Roca, ed., Els castells catalans, 6 vols. (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1967-1990), 5: 658-60. 4 Josep Fernandez Trabal found that wine growing was a principal investment of the Gironese patriciate in the years after 1300. See Fernandez, “De mercaders a terratinents,” L’Avenç 94 (1986): 42-7, esp. 42-3. 5 Marc Torras, ed., El Llibre Verd de Manresa (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1996), 88-9. 6 Torras, El Llibre, 70-1, 85-6.
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entailed at any given time has proven a very elusive figure.7 It is known that in 1254, the city had been worth about £450 per year to Jaume II’s grandfather. By 1329, two years after Jaume’s death, Manresa was raising over two and a half times the 1254 figure. It is impossible to say, however, whether real royal income from the city increased during this period, since there are as yet no price series for Iberia before 1350.8 One can only point to other European trends, such as Herlihy’s wheat prices, and suggest that Jaume II had perhaps doubled Manresa’s real contribution to the Aragonese treasury.9 The main reason for this sudden increase in urban tax revenue was another financial reform carried out under Jaume II, which was the creation of a system of indirect consumption taxes on such commodities as meat, grain, wine, spices, and simple manufactured goods. These were known in Catalonia as imposicions.10 Because the development of an imposicion system happened simultaneously in Barcelona and Manresa, it is probable that it was implemented by royal fiat in other Catalan cities at the same time. The imposicion system can be seen as the culmination of Jaume II’s fiscal policy, even though he did not live to see its full implementation. The new system proved successful, insofar as it enabled the cautious Jaume 7 The few bailiff generals’ books in the ACA which mention Manresa prior to 1380 give accounts of feudal rents, but no indication of total annual payments to the crown. Presumably, all of Manresa’s regular revenue from imposicions, less the costs of urban administration, went to the crown. Since these imposicions also went to pay “extraordinary” taxes, and later, censal debts, in years when these were owed, it appears as though the crown’s income from extraordinary taxes was always earned at the expense of ordinary revenue. This in itself is an important distinction which is seldom discussed. 8 The earliest data are from Earl Hamilton’s Navarre series. His Aragon series has only fragmentary data prior to 1381, and the Valencia series does not commence until 1413 (Earl Hamilton, Money, Prices and Wages in Valencia, Aragon and Navarre, 1351-1500 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1936): Appendices III-V, 213-60). 9 David Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia (New Haven: Yale, 1967), 123, shows that wheat prices ranged from an index figure of 125 in 1251-1275, to 170 in 1301-1325. By 1326-1350, the index had fallen back to 125. 10 Comparable systems had been fully developed in most Italian states by the late thirteenth century. Charles M. de la Roncière, “Indirect Taxes or ‘Gabelles’ at Florence in the Fourteenth Century: The Evolution of Tariffs and Problems of Collection,” in Nicolai Rubenstein, ed., Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence (Evanston, IL: Faber and Faber, 1968).
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to launch a successful conquest of Sardinia between 1322 and 1326, after a quarter century of planning. The work of Jean Broussolle, who in 1955 published a detailed study of Barcelona’s imposicions, is the starting point for understanding the development of the imposicion system. Broussolle discerned that through 1329 Barcelona’s tax system was not regularized. In fact, the control of municipal taxes had passed firmly into the control of Barcelona’s consellers only in 1283. Between 1283 and 1329, according to Broussolle, the tax system entered into an evolutionary phase, in which the sales of indirect taxes on staples were made only irregularly.11 For example, taxes on meat, wine, grains, and ships were sold in 1328 in order to raise money for the marriage of Alfons IV. However, in 1329 no such taxes were sold.12 In the face of such irregularity, Broussolle believes that during this 1283-1329 period most of the ordinary revenue paid by Barcelona to the crown “came from other sources” (“consistant en d’autres impôts”), by which he presumably meant older feudal dues. Exactly what these dues entailed, and how much revenue they provided, remains to be discovered.13 The work of Manuel Sanchez has now subdivided and nuanced the evolutionary period discerned by Broussolle. Sanchez notes that prior to 1321, extraordinary royal levies were raised from the Catalan cities by means of direct impositions known as tallias. From 1321, however, most Catalan cities began to raise sums for extraordinary taxes by selling imposicions. Late as it may seem, the true development of this type of urban tax system dates only from this year.14 The first known references to imposicions date from only a few years before: they are referenced in 1314 in Barcelona, 1316 in Tortosa.15 By combining the narratives of Broussolle and Sanchez, the years between 1321 and 1329 can be seen as a further experi-
11
Broussolle, “Les impositions municipales de Barcelona de 1328 a 1462,” Estudios de Historia Moderna 5 (1955): 1-164, 14. 12 Broussolle, “Les impositions municipales,” 16. 13 But now on Barcelona’s early rents see Pere Orti Gost, Renda i fiscalitat en un ciutat medieval: Barcelona (segles XII-XIV) (Barcelona: Consejo superior de investigaciones scientíficas, 2000). 14 Manuel Sanchez, El naixement de la fiscalitat d’Estat a Catalunya (Vic: Estudis Universitaris, 1995), 91-2. 15 Marc Torras, Els privilegis del “Llibre Verd” de Manresa (Manresa: Parcis Edicions Selectes, 1998), 152.
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mental period, in which the imposicions were heavily relied upon, but were not yet accepted as annual and permanent. From 1330, however, the imposicions became ensconced as a cornerstone of Catalan urban finance. In that year, a new royal campaign was launched against Genoa, and Barcelona’s tax system was reorganized into the form that it would retain until the outbreak of civil war in 1462. The difference between the number and value of imposicions sold in 1328 and in 1330 is striking. Whereas in 1328, only four taxes were sold, in 1330 twenty-four were sold, and the number of taxes would remain close to this level thereafter. Barcelona collected £6,332 in taxes in 1328, but in 1330 it collected £39,892, or over six times the amount collected two years previously. When we consider the portrait of Barcelonese urban finances outlined above, it is interesting to note that the revenue from Manresan imposicions shows a large increase between 1329, when the first figures become available, and 1339, when the next figures are available. The Manresan figures did not increase nearly as much as the Barcelona figures over the same period, but there was an increase of nearly 100 percent when a missing meat tax is added to the total, and of 50 percent when this is left out.16 In 1329, Manresan revenue from imposicions stood close to £1,000, while from 1339 onward it stood closer to £2,000. The probable explanation for this increase is that, in 1330 or shortly thereafter, Manresa’s taxes were reorganized along the same lines as Barcelona’s new system, and it is likely that this reorganization was imposed by the crown. Whether this represents a shift from low to moderate taxes, or from moderate to heavy taxes, especially from the point of view of the cities’ poor householders, is an open question. From Table 1 it can be seen that between 1339 and 1418, Manresan revenue from regular impositions hovered around £2,000, except during the Castilian war years of the 1360s and 70s, when it surpassed £3,000. Since the Black Death cut the population of Manresa by perhaps 30 to 50 per cent in 1348, it is very curious that revenue from imposicions did not change substantially between 1339 and
16 Because the meat tax was usually the single most valuable tax, it was traditional to assign it to a separate purpose, and it was often recorded in special books that were distinct from the records for the remainder of the taxes. Records of meat taxes are therefore often left out of the accounts found in the Barcelona and Manresa council manuals.
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royal levies had been a part of Catalan fiscality for centuries, a new wave of levies on the royal cities was begun in 1321-24, in preparation for Jaume II’s campaign against Sardinia. This campaign would, in fact, initiate a long-standing conflict with Genoa, which reached a crescendo in the early 1350s. It has been suggested that Jaume’s reforms left the Aragonese fiscal system better prepared to deal with the crown’s newly aggressive foreign policy. In fact, the financial machine that was marshalled to finance the conquest of Sardinia has been christened “a new page in the history of royal and municipal finance” by Manuel Sánchez Martínez.26 The reorganization of regular taxes was one branch of the royal initiative, and a reorganization of the irregular tax system was another. The new series of extraordinary levies that began during the 1320s was to last with very few breaks until Catalonia became fiscally exhausted in the mid 1370s. Table 4 summarizes the known payments of over 2,000s that were owed by Manresa to the crown, or that were raised by the city as the result of extraordinary demands made by the crown, between the years of 1325 and 1378. The list is not complete, since several subsidies levied after known sessions of the Corts remain unaccounted for, but the known figures provide a sense of the high level and frequency of extraordinary taxes that were being raised from the Catalan cities during the middle decades of the fourteenth century. It can be observed from Table 4 that extraordinary taxation during this half century was so regular that it became, in effect, a further means of ordinary taxation. The only check on the royal will regarding these taxes was that permission be granted by the Corts, and although much has been made of the Corts’ intransigence, there were few, if any, sessions that did not eventually produce a substantial levy. Another point to be noted is that Manresa’s portions of 26 Sánchez Martínez and his students have done much needed work on Catalan fiscality. See Manuel Sánchez Martínez and Pere Orti Gost, eds., Corts, parlaments i fiscalitat a Catalunya: els capitols del donatiu, 1288-1384 (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya. Departament de Justicia, 1997); Manuel Sánchez Martínez, El naixement de la fiscalitat d’Estat a Catalunya: Segles XII-XIV (Girona, Universitat de Girona, 1995); Manuel Sánchez Martínez, Estudios sobre renta, fiscalidad, y finanzas en la Cataluña bajomedieval (Barcelona: Casa Milà i Fontanals, 1993); and Manuel Sánchez Martínez, “Questie y subsidios en Cataluña durante el primer tercio del siglo XIV: el subsidio para la cruzada granadaina (1329-1334),” Cuadernos de historia econòmica de Cataluña 16 (1987), 11-54.
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A censal was a perpetual money annuity, received by an investor in return for his or her investment of a cash sum (usually substantial).34 Rates for both the censal and violari varied in response to the flux of the credit market. The censal was perpetual, meaning that it could be transmitted to an heir at the death of the owner/recipient. The Catalan censal could also be sold on the market, though, it seems, only with the intervention of the issuing authorities, who were usually municipalities.35 Royal municipalities of all sizes, from large towns to hamlets, issued their own censals; the Manresan council manuals suggest that this practice probably became widespread in the early 1360s.36 In Catalonia, the crown ensured that censals could always be redeemed by the issuing municipality, since it was to the king’s advantage for his cities to be less, rather than more, in debt.37 The first evidence for Manresan sales of violaris comes from the early 1340s.38 It should be noted that in this regard, the Catalans and the Italians consolidated their systems of loans on
Early History of Deposit Banking in Mediterranean Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1943), 147-62. 34 It should be noted that Spanish censal = French rente and Flemish rent. The word rentier is derived from these terms. The rente developed as early as the mid-13th century in Northern France and Flanders, but, as has been noted, did not appear in Catalonia-Aragon until nearly a century later. The censal-rente is a distinct instrument from that used in Northern Italy, where forced loans or prestanze were used alongside voluntary debt systems. This is because in the case of censals the principal did not legally have to be repaid except at the will of the issuing authority. This made censals all the more attractive to late medieval investors since they could be classified by canon lawyers as non-usurious. On these issues see John Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution,” and James Tracy, “On the Dual Origins of Long-Term Urban Debt in Medieval Europe,” in Marc Boone, et al., eds., Urban Public Debts: Urban Government and the Market for Annuities in Western Europe (14th-18th Centuries) (Oakville, CT: David Brown, 2004), 13-26. 35 Munro, “Medieval Origins,” 535. 36 Sánchez Martínez, El naixement, 129-34, speaks of the use of censals as a Catalan financial “system” from the 1360s. Christian Guilleré, Girona Medieval, l’etapa d’apogeu (1285-1360) (Girona: Ajuntament de Girona, 1991), 50-1, says that from 1350 “there was no year in which censals and violaris were not sold” (“A partir de 1350, no hi ha cap any sense emissions de censals i violaris”). It is likely that the smaller Catalan municipal entities began to sell their first censals at the same time as the larger ones, since all were equally indebted to the crown by the acts of the Corts. 37 Munro, “Medieval Origins,” 535. 38 For the appearance of the public debt in Manresa, see Torras, Els privilegis, 191-9.
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a similar time scale. The Venetians had developed a secondary market for their loan shares by 1320; the Genoese consolidated their loan shares in 1340, and the Florentines reorganized their loan system into the Monte Comune by 1345.39 That the plague occurred just after these major institutional reforms certainly meant, in Catalonia at least, that inexperience with managing the new system added to the calamity caused by the plague. Sánchez has noted the speed with which the crown switched from financing its extraordinary levies through tallias and direct payments to financing these levies through the censal system. Sanchez suggests, however, that the imposicion system of consumption taxes was superseded by the system of public debt. In fact, Sanchez’ views on this point should be emended or at least reworded, insofar as the imposicion system was not replaced by the censal system. Rather, as we have seen, the imposicion system formed a regular revenue stream that was not tied to outmoded feudal dues. By 1320, this stream was being used to pay extraordinary taxes.40 Later, after the imposicion system had been made regular and perpetual, the Catalan authorities realized that imposicion revenue could be used to pay censal interest. Thus, the imposicion system was never replaced. Rather it supplemented both the older loan method of paying extraordinary taxes, and it underpinned the newer censal system. The main innovation represented by the censal system, then, was that instead of paying the Barcelona bankers more or less directly, the cities now pledged their regular revenue to a number of intermediate parties, who purchased censals from the city for ready cash. In effect, a layer of middlemen was added. These investors paid lump sums to the cities, and the cities forwarded these sums to the bankers. The cities’ regular revenue now went to pay interest on the censals purchased by the investors, but the cities could also forward far larger lump sums to the Barcelona bankers. In effect, the switch to the debt system, which paid at 15 per cent in the 1340s, had multiplied the cities’ effective short-term revenue nearly sevenfold.41
39
Munro, “Medieval Origins,” 515. Note that the old system of raising tallias (one-time exactions) was still used alongside the imposicion system, throughout the fourteenth century. 41 For interest rates on Catalan violaris and censals, see Fynn-Paul, “The Catalan City,” 149-50. 40
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The danger of this system for the cities and for Catalonia at large was that a far larger network of creditors was now co-opted into the royal fisc. The pressure on city governments to pay their interest on time was now much higher than it had been during the brief era of imposicions and extraordinary taxes. The effects of unexpectedly difficult wars and unforeseeable catastrophic plagues on this newly emergent system will be detailed in the next section.
Warfare, Plague, Debt, and Taxation in Manresa, 1347-1381 It has been noted that a new age of conflict was initiated by the Catalans with their seizure of Sardinia in 1322-1326. The principal Catalan conflict of the 1340s involved the successful annexation of Mallorca by the new king Pere III (1336-1387). But this was not terribly costly to the Catalan cities, and when the Black Death struck in 1348, it does not appear as though the Manresan treasury was in dire straits. It is therefore difficult to say that outstanding debts played an important role in civic finances during the immediate aftermath of the 1348 plague. In any event, by 1351 Pere III felt strong enough to ally with the Venetians against the Genoese. The following year witnessed the famous showdown in the Bosporus, in which the Venetians, Catalans, and Greeks won a Pyrrhic victory over the Genoese, or, alternately, in which the Genoese won a Pyrrhic victory over the allies.42 The Catalans and Genoese fought another major engagement in 1353, and this time, the Genoese were utterly routed off the coast of Sardinia, ending their effective resistance for a time. In 1354 a third campaign was required in order for the Catalans to restore some semblance of order on Sardinia. This expedition was led by King Pere III himself. The financial effects of this Genoese-Sardinian war on Manresa can be ascertained from Table 4. From 1353 through 1356, unprecedentedly large annual payments were made to the crown by Manresa, and it is likely that these were paid by the sale of censals and/or violaris. Since the war began in 1351-1352, it is likely that the city made payments in those years as well, although due to lingering
42 For the former view, see Thomas Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 109; for the latter, see Steven A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 220.
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bureaucratic confusion caused by the Black Death, the town records for those years are disorganized and scanty. It can be seen from Table 4 that the high annual expenses of the Sardinian war led directly, without a break, into the hostilities of the Castilian war, which I have argued was an extension of the Sardinian war and largely instigated by Pere III himself.43 But what might have been originally intended as a mere demonstration of Aragonese power soon turned into a defensive war for survival, as Pedro I “The Cruel” of Castile (1350-1369) proved himself doggedly willing and able to annex portions of Aragon to his own crown. Despite recent rebellion and civil war in Castile, Pedro quickly showed that Castile’s superior resources were more than a match for the Aragonese on land.44 As a result, the Catalans were forced to fight a defensive war, which lasted for over a decade, until the final defeat of Pedro in 1369 by the Aragonese-supported pretender to the throne, Enrique of Trastámara. Even then, hostilities did not cease, since Enrique proved himself unwilling to yield concessions made to Aragon during the war. Perhaps most dangerous of all was the fact that the French White Companies had gained a taste for Iberian campaigning during the war, when they had been enlisted on the side of Aragon. Pere III soon realized that most of his cities were woefully under-fortified, and presented tempting targets in the event of a mutiny. The king therefore ordered a general fortification of Catalonia in 1368. The cities were to pay for their own walls, and the timing was, to say the least, unfortunate. Table 4 shows the long and depressing list of extraordinary levies that were raised by the Manresans during these several decades of crisis. Note that most of the largest payments came during the 1350s; from the early 1360s, after a decade of unrelenting subsidies, each successive levy extracted from the Manresan fisc was like wringing the proverbial blood from a stone. Since a detailed history of
43
Fynn-Paul, “The Catalan City,” 41-9. It should be noted that in the 1350s the “Crown of Aragon” consisted of the semi-autonomous states of Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia, and Majorca. I take the liberty of using “Aragonese” and “Catalans” and near synonyms, since about 90 per cent of the population of the Crown of Aragon, including its royal house, was Catalan-speaking, and likewise the vast majority of the confederation’s wealth was concentrated in Catalan speaking areas. The capital of the confederation, which Pere III attempted to embellish in various ways, was Barcelona. 44
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this period would be beyond the purpose of the present work, it will suffice to focus on two periods, 1362-1363, and 1375-1377, in which the vise of debt and plague squeezed Manresa with especial severity. The year 1362 saw Pedro of Castile break a Vatican-arranged truce to attack the Aragonese frontier city of Calatayud. In response, Pere III had little choice but to enlist the French White Companies, a situation which caused real alarm in Manresa. Barricades were set up at weak points in the city walls, for no one trusted the companies after their infamous exploits in southern France.45 As this drama was unfolding, a prolonged drought threatened to create the worst famine in a generation. In April 1362 Manresa dedicated £60 (1,200s) toward the purchase of grain.46 This had not been done since the great famines of the 1330s. In July 1363, just before the harvest, the Manresan councillors reported a dearth of wine, indicating a poor vendimia in the previous year.47 Weakened by famine, the Catalan populace began to succumb to a fresh wave of plague in the summer of 1362. Together with most of Europe, Catalonia would continue to experience serious outbreaks of plague in fifteen year cycles after 1348, and these cycles did not abate much until the end of the fifteenth century. The new plague lasted through the fall of 1362 and into the winter, adding the threat of sudden death by contagion to the miseries of the Castilian invasion, the menace of the White Companies, oppressive taxes, and the citizens’ desperate and laborious efforts to encircle themselves with defensible fortifications. In typical fashion, the Manresan consellers’ laconic record of the 1362 plague outbreak says nothing about its duration or severity. Yet this record is one of the most significant council entries of the fourteenth century. It may be summarized as follows: Because of the pestilence which recently ravaged the city, and because of the many payments which we must make to the king, this city
45 MC 1362.8.1. Note: MC stands for the Manuales Concilii of the city of Manresa. They are unfoliated but entries are dated in chronological order and they have therefore been referenced by date. The citations relevant to this article are: Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Manresa AHCM/AM I-7 (1358.10.281364.3.6); AHCM/AM I-8 (1365.3.18-1373.5.18); AHCM/AM I-9 (1373.6.11375.3.22); and AHCM/AM I-10 (1375.3.25-1381.10.3). 46 “Ad opus emendi frumentum.” MC 1362.4.30. 47 MC 1363.7.9.
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stands in need of people who practise the mechanical arts; likewise it is our duty to attempt to populate the city by whatever means possible. Therefore we proclaim that all those who are not natural to the city and who wish to stay in it for more than ten days must write their name in the book of the city. These shall be free from all fogatges, questias reyals, and other occasional taxes; likewise they shall be free from all regular civic taxes (imposicions) for a period of ten years.48
The first thing to be gleaned from this entry is that the plague of 1362-1363 hit the city with some severity. Catalan historiography has made much of a reference which calls this plague the mortaldat dels infants, but it is clear that the Manresans also experienced it as a mortaldat dels menestrals (labourers).49 The Manresan councillors’ sentiment could not be a more fitting illustration of an analysis made by Anthony Bridbury regarding the effects of the first two waves of plague on the populace of England. Bridbury argued that in England the plague of 1348 did not cause a severe labour shortage; rather, it had served only to alleviate the severe overcrowding experienced by most of the country through the first half of the fourteenth century. It was not until the plague of 1362, Bridbury argues, that the country began to experience an acute shortage of labour.50 As far as can be determined from the Manresan evidence, Bridbury’s assessment also holds true in Catalonia. After the plague of 1362, the town councillors felt it necessary to foster policies that would increase the number of householders in the city. Depopulation was now added to the list of enemies they faced. The year 1362 thus marks a very important psychological turning point in the mentality of Manresa’s citizens and government. The city had been crowded, and even overpopulated from the vantage point of the lower classes, during the first half of the fourteenth century. Between 1348 and 1362, despite the ravages of the Black Death, the Manresan councillors gave no indication that they felt the city’s population to be inadequate. From 1363, however, their attitude changed dramatically. Henceforth they considered their city to be underpopulated.
48
MC 1363.5.3. On the mortaldat dels infants, see Carme Batlle, “L’expansió baixmedieval [segles XIII-XV],” in Pierre Vilar, ed., Història de Catalunya (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1999), 3: 252. 50 A. R. Bridbury, “The Black Death,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 26 (1973): 557-92. 49
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But the councillors’ own words show that, to their minds, even more important than the labour shortage caused by the plague was the shortage of taxpayers it created. While the city’s debt burden continued to grow, the plague of 1362 had wiped out a significant portion of the taxpaying households. As the population continued to shrink, the debt burden remained to be shared amongst fewer survivors. Certainly this phenomenon was having an adverse effect on the Manresan economy. On the same day that the consellers inaugurated their new immigration policy, they recorded that the treasurer had examined his books and determined that the city’s regular impositions were no longer sufficient to pay its censal annuities. As a short-term expedient, all of the city’s imposicions were sold for the upcoming four months. Meanwhile, a fogatge, or hearth tax, had been declared, presumably at the Corts of Monzón in February 1363, and the city was now forced to sell 21,000s worth of new censals to make a payment on the fogatge.51 As though this were not burden enough, one month earlier the king had required the city to pay for the upkeep of a contingent of 25 clients, or mercenaries, who were probably mounted men-at-arms.52 In fact, these may have been some of the very Frenchmen against whom the Manresans were so desperately fortifying themselves. Eight Manresan men, two from each quarter, were appointed to collect a new tallia for the maintenance of this company. Not surprisingly, on 6 April the consellers reported that the eight men were having some difficulty in collecting the money.53 In an effort to speed up the tax collection, the royal veguer and batlle imposed a deadline upon the tax collectors themselves, after which time they would be personally responsible for paying a penalty of 500 gold morabatins.54 In this difficult situation, the eight members of the committee, all of whom were well-to-do and well connected to city government, claimed that they had not consented to this
51 MC 1363.5.3. For the fogatge at Monzón, see Cortes de los Antiguos Reinos de Aragón y de Valencia y Principado de Cataluña (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1896-1922), 2: 149-50. This is mentioned at the Corts of Barcelona, beginning 10 March 1364. 52 MC 1363.3.26. 53 MC 1363.4.6. 54 The morabatí was derived from an old Arabic coin, and as a unit of account it was used in Catalonia throughout the middle ages for assessing judicial fines. For the equivalency in sous (1 morabatí = 9s), see MC 1372.5.21.
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penalty and were therefore not bound to it.55 Unfortunately, the entry breaks off at this point and nothing more was written on the matter. It is very interesting to learn that the town patricians claimed to have the right to consent to fines imposed upon them by the bailiff and veguer: This was clearly a challenge to the authority of the royal officials, who were admittedly acting in an extraordinary manner, and it is unfortunate that the results of this challenge cannot be known. The incident highlights important changes taking place in the tone of civic life. Not only were the lower classes becoming restive about sustaining such a high tax burden, but years of high taxation had created a situation in which it was becoming increasingly unpleasant to be a conseller or jurat. Civic officials were now inescapably sandwiched between the ire of their neighbours and the impatience of the powerful agents of the crown. In this dispute may be seen one of the early foreshadowings of the state of affairs described in the royal privilege of 1380, in which the councillors had complained that the city’s best men were avoiding public service.56 Further signs of unrest were also evident in 1363. In the summer of that year, the city gave plenum posse to a new treasurer, Bernat de Area, who received authority to hear accounts from whomever he saw fit, in addition to the authority to collect what was due to the city. Bernat was to receive the very high rate of 3 sous per livre, or 15 per cent, of the money that he extracted from the citizens. It is probable that some of this commission was destined to go to the guards who were appointed to help Bernat in his efforts.57 The use of guards to enforce the payment of taxes was a novel step at Manresa, but this tactic would continue to be employed through the early 1370s. The city remained in a state of quasi-revolt through the entire period. After “maxing out” their regular revenue in 1362-1363, the Manresans could continue to raise additional funds, but only at the cost of introducing novel modes of taxation. But they had no choice, since at this moment Pedro of Castile threatened their very sovereignty, and so they paid up. In Manresa, the 28,000s levy of 1365 was raised by the expedient of a “weekly tax.” Every Sunday one 55 56 57
MC 1363.4.6. Torras, El Llibre, 269. MC 1363.7.15.
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or more shillings were collected from each head of household according to their income level.58 This weekly tax was collected between 1365 and 1367.59 In 1368, when Pere III ordered Manresa and other cities of Catalonia to construct new fortifications, this order, too, was obeyed, albeit at the cost of six or seven more years of extraordinary expenses.60 In 1375, after nearly thirty years of unrelenting hardship, another famine menaced the city. In addition to other levies, the city voluntarily raised 51,000s over the next three years in order to complete their irrigation works known as the cequia, which they viewed as their primary defence against famine. This was a Herculean effort: in August of 1375, the administrator Pere Nadal had rendered an account for his office of the “clavarius of the impositions assigned to pay censals,” which showed that the city had paid £3,311 on the debt over the previous year. Only a month before, in July, Manresa’s jurats had admitted, in inelegant Latin, that they could find no one to purchase more censals from them—mutuo invenietur non potest. The city’s credit had reached its limit. Tellingly, interest rates on censals were at an all-time high, suggesting that the rest of the principality was in similar straits.61 This is borne out by the narrative sources as well. In a unique passage from the Chronicle of Pere III, the king specifically calls attention to his financial incapacity during the years 1375 and 1376. He notes that “Our house of Aragon had had great trouble and harm from King Don Enrique [of Castile], and especially had become impoverished [because of him] ...”62
58
MC 1365.4.19. I have found payment records for the weekly tax between MC 1365.4.1 and MC 1367.8.30; for the “daily tax” see MC 1368.9.26. 60 Renewed efforts on the Manresan walls (picking up from the panicked efforts of 1362-1363) began in September 1368. The 1368 order to fortify led to the imposition of another new tax, the “daily tax” about which little is said in the records. MC 1368.9.26. For the fortification of Vic in 1368, see Eduard Junyent, “La fortification de Vich en 1368,” Ausa 2 (1955-57): 347-56. I suspect from the nearly identical architecture that the walls of Montblanc and parts of Barcelona’s walls were also built in the same year, indicating that the order to fortify was probably widespread. 61 MC 1375.7.17 62 Mary and J. N. Hillgarth, trans., Pere III. Chronicle (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1980), 2: 590. 59
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Nor did the crisis abate with the lessening of invasion fears after 1376. Years of high censal payments combined with demographic decline was taking its toll on Manresa’s vitality, and on its very viability as a socio-political entity. On 10 January 1377 this trend was analyzed by the councillors of Manresa in no uncertain terms: Many inhabitants of this city have deserted it, moving their homes elsewhere, on account of which this city is becoming depopulated, and there are not enough people to pay the censals and other burdens by which the city is bound.63
Applications: Genoa, Florence, and Venice This analysis of the Catalan evidence is, fittingly, also applicable to the experience of the Catalans’ archrival Genoa. In his account of the 1350-1355 Genoese-Catalan-Venetian war, Steven Epstein describes a situation in which the Mediterranean powers paradoxically began a new conflict just after their cities had been devastated by the worst plague in memory. Utilizing vastly reduced navies, the Venetians, Catalans and Genoese fought on, with dire results for Genoa.64 Nor did the Genoese situation improve over the next several decades. By 1380, the Genoese tax on salt had raised its price to twelve times what the state paid for it. By the 1390s, Epstein reports, consumption taxes were at revolutionary levels, and unprecedented levels of coercion were required in order to collect them. In Genoa, as in Catalonia, consumption taxes were primarily used to pay interest on the debt, and the Genoese debt had remained very high due to almost continuous warfare. As in Catalonia,
63
MC 1377.1.10. “... plures ipsius civitatis habitatores deseruit ipsam civitatem, transferendo eorum domicilia aliundem, propter quod ipsam civitatis inhabitatibilis effici posset et non esset qui solveret censualia et alia onera ad que ipsam tenitur.” 64 Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 219-21. It should be noted that Epstein follows a long Italianist tradition of describing the 1350-1355 war as “Genoa’s war with Venice,” even though Catalonia played an equally important role in the conflict. This is mentioned only because one of the purposes of this paper is to show how thoroughly the Catalans were integrated into the Mediterranean trade system by this time. They were, in effect, a third major Mediterranean naval power, which between 1200 and 1500 gradually increased its maritime influence, largely at the expense of Genoa.
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“creditors were so vital to the continuing functioning of the state their goodwill naturally took precedence over common people needing bread, firewood, and salt.”65 Of course, Genoa also experienced recurring outbreaks of plague, such as that which occurred in 1385, and population levels did not recover between major visitations.66 Although Liguria is isolated from the rest of Italy, and Tuscan comparisons must be taken with a grain of salt, Herlihy estimated that between 1340 and 1404, Pistoia lost between two thirds and three quarters of its population.67 With the Manresan example at hand, we are now in a position to answer one further, and very important, question about the Genoese situation described above. Why did extravagant consumption taxes and state creditors become such an issue during these decades, and why were unprecedented levels of coercion required in the collection of taxes? Much of the specific mechanism behind these factors, which we now recognize as a “classic” post-plague urban crisis, must be the fact that the state had contracted a high debt burden, which was impossible to pay off in the short term, at the same time that householders continued to perish in significant and unforeseeable numbers. The remaining householders had no choice but to pay off the debt which had been contracted in the name of a significantly larger populace, years or even decades before. The Manresan example can also be applied to the famous case of the Florentine Ciompi revolt of 1378. As is well known, one of first demands of the rebels was an abolition of the funded debt and a lowering of the gabelles that had paid its interest.68 The Ciompi government of July and August of that year did manage to lower the tax rate in the Florentine contado by one third, and abolish the hated salt tax, at least for a brief time. Likewise, it attempted to suspend all payments on the funded debt for a three month period.
65
Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 234-6. Note again that in Genoa, Florence, and Venice, debt shares were often assessed as involuntary “forced loans,” whereas in Catalonia censal holders were almost always voluntary investors. Secondary markets for forced loan shares did open up to some degree in all three Italian republics however. 66 Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 243. 67 Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia, 76. 68 Roberto Barducci, “Le riforme finanziarie nel tumulto dei Ciompi,” in Il tumulto dei Ciompi: Un momento di storia fiorentina ed europea, Acts of the Congress of 1979 (Florence: Olschki, 1981), 100-1.
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Another related reform was the creation of a program for implementing a direct tax, called an estimo. But in the end, the revolutionary government found that it could not function without maintaining interest payments on the debt, and Brucker lays much of the blame for the regime’s failure on its vacillating debt policy, which alienated both the government’s lower and middle class supporters and the state’s wealthy creditors.69 Part of why the Florentine situation became so dire by the 1370s might be ascribed to the mechanisms described above. It is possible that through the 1370s, at least, the Florentines themselves were less acutely aware of the continuing effects of population decline on their debt system. This could have occurred both because the nature of a large city is such that it is difficult to judge marginal population decreases, and because Florence, like other metropoles, was a focus of emigration. This would have provided an illusion of continual demographic replenishment, at least for a time.70 In medium-sized cities such as Manresa, however, even slight losses in population would have been more obvious and more keenly felt by civic officials in need of funds. The Venetian debt system, for its part, began to show serious signs of trouble from 1363, when the government ceased to make any pretence of redeeming forced loan shares.71 In 1378, at the same moment that Florence became embroiled in its civil war, Venice became involved in a disastrous war with Genoa, known as the War of Chioggia. It is very notable from the point of view of the present discussion that Venice managed to pay the interest on its state debts regularly between 1262 and 1380, and only at this moment did it succumb to temporary insolvency. Between 1378 and 1381, the Venetians were forced to lend 41 percent of their assessed patrimonies to the state, more than ever before. Many defaulted and had their lands sold at auction. The Venetian debt system, according to Mueller, never recovered from the blow it received during the
69
Gene Brucker, “The Ciompi Revolution,” in Rubinstein, Florentine Studies, 338-44. 70 On the issue of emigration to the capital, see Semuel K. Cohn, Jr., Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348-1434 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 84. Here Cohn quotes a document of 1402 in which the Florentines admit that their estimo had to be reassessed because war and plague had reduced the population of the mountains in particular. 71 Munro, “The Medieval Origins,” 515.
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TOLL AND TRADE IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND James Masschaele
In the year 1272, Henry Black, the common clerk of the town of Ipswich, was indicted as a notorious thief. Upon learning of the indictment, Black fled from the town and was never heard from again. There is nothing particularly unusual about the indictment of a public official in the period, nor about Black’s decision to flee rather than face justice, but the erstwhile common clerk’s behavior upon learning of his indictment has few, if any, parallels. To spite his fellow townsmen, Black somehow managed to gain possession of the town’s customary and a number of its foundation charters before his departure from the town. Like Black himself, these guarantors of Ipswich’s privileges and freedoms were never to be seen again. Initially, the leaders of the town sought to continue the routines of local government as if though nothing had happened. Eventually, however, they came to view the absence of a formal documentary basis for local government as a problem, and they decided to convene the citizenry to draw up a new statement of the customs by which the town was governed. The document they produced, commonly referred to as the Ipswich Domesday Book, is a fascinating account of the government and economy of a major English port in the later thirteenth century.1 It naturally has much to say about local government and commercial regulation, but what is most surprising about the document is its lengthy account of procedures for collecting tolls. In this account, Ipswich’s leaders made a sustained effort to specify the distinctive features of the commodities liable to pay toll and the circumstances of their circulation as trade goods. They began with a description of the extensive array of tolls 1
Printed in Sir Travis Twiss, ed., The Black Book of the Admiralty, Rolls Series no. 55 (London: Longman, 1873), 2: 1-207. The passages about the town’s tolls that are discussed in this paper are found on pp. 184-207. A good summary of the circumstances in which the text came to be written is given in Ninth Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, part 1 (London: s.n., 1883), 239-43.
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collected on the town’s quay, and then followed up with a series of shorter descriptions of the tolls collected in eight separate markets specializing in cloth, fish, wool, cheese, timber, bread, meat, and animals. Between these various accounts of the items traded and the rates of toll imposed in each market, the compilers of the document entered brief notes summarizing unusual features of the markets: the toll on hemp, for example, appertained to the cloth market, but the toll on hemp seed was paid in the cheese market. Within each account, the authors distinguished not only the different goods that were traded in that market but also their mode of transport and a host of incidental details about how goods might be processed or modified in the course of being sold. Though exceptionally detailed, the account of toll collection in Ipswich represents a common documentary genre of the high and late Middle Ages. Well over 50 lists of tolls collected in English towns and markets prior to 1350 can now be found in print and hundreds more exist in manuscript form. These documents are a heterogeneous bunch, ranging from expansive descriptions like the one found in the Ipswich Domesday Book to simple lists with a small number of commodities and rates. Like the documents Georges Despy described in his survey of medieval toll documents in France and Germany, English lists often appear in ad hoc forms that defy easy generalization.2 Perhaps because of their heterogeneity, economic historians have paid relatively little attention to them, and their study has been left largely in the hands of local historians and antiquarians. But their sheer number suggests that they are of more than local interest and deserving of more careful scrutiny than they have hitherto received. They are, in fact, a treasure trove of information about the conduct of trade in medieval England and they raise an important but curiously neglected issue for medieval commerce, namely the relationship between tolls and the development of trade. This article will examine four issues related to the use of tolls in medieval England. The first section summarizes the main types of toll levied in medieval England and sketches their chronological development. The second section provides some quantitative evidence for the revenues generated by tolls and relates the revenue figures to the rates of toll specified in extant toll lists. The third 2
Georges Despy, Les Tarifs de Tonlieux, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, 19 (Turnhout: Éditions Brepols, 1976), 13-6.
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section looks at the payers of toll and considers how different groups of payers were affected by royal grants of exemption from toll. The fourth and final section offers some thoughts on the overall impact of tolls in the period. An appendix enumerating the many lists of tolls that have appeared in print can be found at the end of the article. Types of Toll To make sense of the great variety in the form and structure of tolls and toll lists, it is helpful to divide them into two principal types, one associated with the collection of local or customary tolls and the other with special tolls collected for a fixed period of time to finance public works projects. The two types had different histories as well as significantly different roles to play in urban finance. Each type merits consideration on its own before any general assessment of the relationship between tolls and trade can be offered. The Ipswich account in the town’s Domesday Book is a good example of a document concerned with the collection of local or customary tolls. Such lists encompass several different kinds of toll, the two most important being toll collected on sales in a marketplace or fair and toll imposed on the passage of goods through a particular town or along a particular route. In theory these were two distinctive forms of taxation, but in practice it is often difficult to determine which type is documented in a particular list, and it seems likely that municipal officials did not distinguish sharply between the two. Tolls on passage were sometimes denoted by the Middle English thurghtoll but the Latin word teloneum (with common variants teoloneum and theolonium) could be used to describe just about any toll.3 In more descriptive accounts the circumstances of collection can sometimes be diagnosed from incidental details, but in general extant lists give frustratingly little detail about when and where tolls were assessed. Information of this sort is more likely to be found in court records dealing with disputes over exemptions from toll than in lists of toll rates.4 3 Throughtoll was sometimes levied on roads or bridges that were not associated with a specific town or market but it was far more commonly levied in places that had commercial facilities in which sales tolls were collected. 4 Such disputes are discussed more fully in James Masschaele, Peasants,
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Local tolls existed well before public works tolls came into being and they also predate by a considerable margin the earliest lists that have survived. Examples of both transit tolls and sales tolls can be found in the Anglo-Saxon world and may go back to the late Roman period. For the continent, F. L. Ganshof has shown how Merovingian and then Carolingian kings sought to emulate late Roman practices with respect to toll and toll exemptions.5 Similarly detailed study has not been carried out for Anglo-Saxon England, but there is no question that tolls were levied in the period.6 Domesday Book contains numerous references to toll income and includes a rudimentary list of the tolls collected in Lewes, Sussex.7 An undated eleventh-century list of the local tolls collected at Billingsgate in London points to the same conclusion, as do the formulaic references to “toll and team” in Anglo-Saxon charters, a formula that goes back to the tenth century, if not earlier.8 Over the course of the twelfth century, the documentary evidence associated with toll collection becomes much richer, particularly in the form of charters granting exemptions from toll. By 1200, nearly 30 towns had acquired a charter granting toll exemptions, and many monasteries had done likewise.9 This body of evidence suggests that local tolls had become widespread by the end of the twelfth century, and also suggests that their development was particularly extensive in the period after 1150, since the vast majority of the exemption charters (25 of 30) date to the second half of the twelfth century. Evidence related to the actual functioning of tolls in the period is, Merchants, and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 129-46. 5 Ganshof, “A propos du tonlieu à l’époque Carolingienne,” in La Città nell’alto Medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto Medioevo, 6 (Spoleto, [s.n.], 1959), 485-508. 6 F. E. Harmer, “Chipping and Market: A Lexicographical Investigation,” in Cyril Fox and Bruce Dickens, eds., The Early Cultures of North-West Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 335-60; P. H. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1998), 225-6. 7 H. C. Darby, Domesday England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), passim; Adolphus Ballard, The Domesday Boroughs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), 73-5. 8 N. S. B. Gras, The Early English Customs System (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1918), 153-5; Middle English Dictionary, electronic version (http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/mec/), s.v. “Tol.” 9 A. Ballard, ed., British Borough Charters, 1042-1216 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1913), cxxxviii-cxlv.
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unfortunately, relatively meager. Only two lists that can be securely dated to the twelfth century have surfaced to date, one describing tolls collected in Newcastle in the reign of Henry I and the other detailing tolls collected in Cardiff in the second half of the century. Both bear close resemblance to lists from later periods, but they enumerate fewer items of trade and their descriptions of commodities lack the precision and specificity of later examples. In general, the twelfth-century evidence suggests that tolls were going through a phase of significant growth, especially after 1150, but it also suggests that they had yet to reach their mature form. The volume of documentary evidence related to tolls increases dramatically in the thirteenth century. As is often the case, the relationship between the survival of sources and real economic change is difficult to disentangle. The thirteenth century is in general much better documented than the twelfth century and the insistence that longstanding practices and traditions be put in writing is one of its great hallmarks.10 In this regard, the increase in documentation may be due mainly to the nature of our source material rather than to any substantive change in the practice of toll collection. Similarly, the thirteenth century was a period in which local rights and privileges came in for close scrutiny, particularly rights and privileges that bore an association with royal authority.11 The most common context in which lists of local tolls were recorded is, in fact, a royal inquest to establish how tolls were collected in a particular place. Even statements of toll rates and procedures that were not directly developed in response to a formal investigation may owe their existence to an awareness that the king looked more favorably on franchise holders with evidence in writing than on those who relied on longstanding tradition. But it is also likely that there were substantive changes in the role tolls played in urban finance and the economy as a whole. The “long” thirteenth century was a period characterized by the foundation of a plethora of new markets and towns, each with the right to collect tolls on the transactions they facilitated.12 It was, 10 Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 11 Donald W. Sutherland, Quo Warranto Proceedings in the Reign of Edward I, 1278-1294 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). 12 Maurice Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages. Town Plantation in England, Wales, and Gascony (New York: Lutterworth Press, 1967); Richard
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moreover, a period in which many of the larger towns acquired greater local control over their markets and tolls through the acquisition of royal charters granting self-government.13 Most of these towns appear to have collected tolls before they acquired formal status as self-governing royal boroughs, but their agreement to pay an annual farm to the king in return for their rights meant that toll revenues came to loom much larger in borough affairs; in their dealings with the king many town leaders made a direct association between their right to collect local tolls and their duty to pay their annual farm. Perhaps most significantly of all, the “long” thirteenth century was a period of considerable economic growth, involving a dramatic increase in the money supply, significant technological innovation, and vastly increased commercial activity at both regional and international levels.14 It was, consequently, a period in which toll collectors were well rewarded for their work and thus particularly interested in enhancing their rights. The history of public works tolls also points to the thirteenth century as a period of significant growth. Public works tolls constituted a special form of toll granted by the king to a town to allow it to raise money for a local construction project.15 The most common type was murage, collected for the construction, improvement, or maintenance of city walls. Other common types included pavage, collected for the improvement of city streets, and pontage, collected for the improvement of bridges. The earliest grant of this form of toll, to finance the construction of a town wall in Hereford, was made in 1216.16 The Hereford charter provides few specifics about
Britnell, The Commercialization of English Society, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1996); Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants, and Markets. 13 Ballard, ed., British Borough Charters, 1042-1216; A. Ballard and J. Tait, eds., British Borough Charters, 1216-1307 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1923). 14 For a recent assessment of the period’s growth, see John Langdon and James Masschaele, “Commercial Activity and Population Growth in Medieval England,” Past & Present 190 (Feb., 2006): 35-81. 15 These grants have not been systematically studied in their own right, but good accounts can be found in Hilary L. Turner, Town Defences in England and Wales (London: J. Baker, 1971) and Constance Fraser, “The Pattern of Trade in the North-East of England, 1265-1350,” Northern History 4 (1969): 44-66. 16 T. D. Hardy, ed., Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati, Record Commission no. 15, 2 vols. (London, Record Commission, 1833-1844),
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how tolls were to be collected, referring only to a collection of customary charges on loads of goods that were brought to the town.17 It is difficult to determine from the wording of the grant whether the king intended to give the citizens of Hereford the right to impose a second set of tolls that mirrored the town’s local tolls or simply the right to retain revenue from the local tolls that had formerly flowed into royal coffers. The first grant that specifically instituted new tolls occurred in 1220, when Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth acquired the right to collect tolls to facilitate the construction of their walls.18 By the standards of later grants, the list of tolls established in this joint grant of 1220 is fairly rudimentary, giving rates for loads of unspecified merchandise conveyed by ship, cart, packhorse and backpack, along with rates for seven different types of livestock. What began as a matter of military necessity in the troubled period following the death of King John gradually developed into a routine act of government. Over the course of the next century and a half, English kings made more than 1,000 grants of public works tolls; indeed, one could rightly conclude that much of the infrastructure of English urban life in the Middle Ages, and for some time beyond, owed its existence to the activities of the toll collectors of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.19 In the later fourteenth century public works tolls began to fall out of favor, as towns moved towards direct taxation of local inhabitants as a preferable means of generating revenue for public works. Investment at levels that characterized the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was sustained in relatively few towns in the fifteenth century, and it seems as though the overall economic contraction of the period meant that tolls were no longer a cost-effective means of generating revenue.
1: 267b. Early murage grants are discussed in Charles Young, The English Royal Boroughs and Royal Administration 1130-1307 (Durham, N. C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1961), 104. 17 The grant was renewed in 1219, but the renewal sheds little additional light on the original grant. Patent Rolls of the Reign of King Henry III, AD 1216-1225 (London: Mackie, 1901), 224. 18 Patent Rolls of the Reign of King Henry III, AD 1216-1225, 238-9. 19 Alan Ralph Cooper, “Obligation and Jurisdiction: Roads and Bridges in Medieval England (c. 700-1300),” Ph.D. Thesis, Harvard University (1998), 274; Turner, Town Defences, 238-43.
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The period from 1150 to 1350 can fairly be described as the heyday of toll collection in medieval England. Tolls certainly existed well before the expansion of the twelfth century and they continued to play a significant role in urban budgets for many centuries after 1350. Indeed, the system of local tolls fixed in place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries persisted, with occasional additions of new trade commodities, into the nineteenth century.20 But their internal development and their impact on trade were especially pronounced in the two centuries before the Black Death, and consequently their development in this period deserves particularly close scrutiny.
Rates and Annual Revenues Both local tolls and public works tolls were capable of generating significant revenues. Already at the time of Domesday Book there are indications that tolls were well worth collecting: the tolls of Dover were said to be worth £22 in 1086, and even the small market town of Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire accounted for market tolls of £7, although it is possible in the latter case that the entire revenue of the market was included.21 Most of the Domesday entries referring to the value of markets and tolls, however, deal with relatively small amounts of money.22 Markets in the small boroughs of Taunton and Frome in Somerset were valued at less than £3, and the borough markets of Okehampton (Devon) and Tewkesbury (Gloucestershire) were valued at less than £1. Even the port of Pevensey, Sussex, which appears to have been thriving in 1086, accounted for toll revenues of only £4. The dearth of information in Domesday Book about market and toll revenues in larger towns makes generalization difficult, but it seems likely that most towns would have envied Dover’s toll receipts in 1086. By the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, when we next have a substantial body of quantitative evidence, many towns 20
Great Britain House of Commons, First Report of the Royal Commission on Market Rights and Tolls. Parliamentary Papers 1888, vol. 53. Reports from Commissioners, Inspectors, and Others, vol. 30 (London: s.n., 1889). 21 Darby, Domesday England, 300, 369. 22 Darby, Domesday England, 369-70; Carl Stephenson, Borough and Town, A Study of Urban Origins (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1933), 109.
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were enjoying remarkably healthy incomes from their tolls. Even some relatively modest towns brought in more than £20 per annum from their local tolls. Accounts for Oswestry, Shropshire, for example, record incomes from tolls and market fees of £20 in 1271 and more than £27 in 1276.23 In an inquisition post mortem in 1307 for the town of Chepstow, Monmouthshire, a jury stated that the tolls of the market and fair were worth £20.24 An account of the town of Scarborough in 1316-1317 records toll receipts of £28.25 An account for Grantham, Lincolnshire in 1324-1325 states that the tolls and tronage of the market were farmed for £25, with the tolls and other perquisites of the fair bringing in roughly the same amount.26 Even higher revenues accrued to larger towns. Colchester, for example, leased its tolls for £35 per annum in 1310.27 When asked to report on the revenue that could be raised by leasing the town’s tolls, a jury in Berwick in 1303 responded that they could be let at farm for £40 per annum.28 Still higher amounts are recorded in several bailiff’s accounts of the late thirteenth century: Northampton’s bailiffs accounted for about £44 in one year, while Gloucester’s bailiffs reported more than £50 and Lincoln’s more than £75 in single years.29 Ipswich generated more than £69 by leasing out the revenues from its markets in 1287-1288, a figure that helps to explain why the local Domesday Book, written a few years later, gives such a lavish description of how the town collected its tolls.30 Municipal officials enjoyed similarly high revenues when they collected public works tolls. An investigation into the conduct of toll collectors in Bristol in 1340 found that £516 had been collected in the preceding twenty years, yielding an average yearly intake of 23
G. C. Baugh, ed., A History of Shropshire, vol. 4: Victoria History of the Counties of England (Oxford: Constable, 1989), 68. 24 M. W. Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages (New York: Praeger, 1967), 66. 25 London, The National Archives, E101/506/22. 26 London, The National Archives, SC6/913/23. 27 Court Rolls of the Borough of Colchester, trans. Isaac Herbert Jeayes, 4 vols. (Colchester: [s.n.], 1921), 1: 3. 28 Gras, Early English Customs System, 165. 29 London, The National Archives, SC6/1248/8; London, The National Archives, E101/505/24; Historical Manuscripts Commission Twelfth Report, part 10 (London: s.n., 1891), 420. 30 Nathaniel Bacon, The Annalls of Ipswich, ed. William H. Richardson (Ipswich: S.H. Cowell, 1884), 68.
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approximately £26.31 Shrewsbury collected nearly £30 in murage in the politically troubled year of 1264-1265.32 In Great Yarmouth, murage collectors brought in more than £66 in 1342-1343.33 London decided to lease its murage tolls in the early 1330s and earned £109, £126, and £113 from three annual leases.34 Somewhat surprisingly, Newcastle was able to generate revenues comparable to those in London, raising £120 from its murage grant in 1280.35 Walls and bridges were voracious consumers of capital and Hilary Turner has argued that the sums collected from tolls were often insufficient to fund the projects for which they were earmarked.36 While Turner’s argument certainly has merit, the sums collected are nonetheless impressive when viewed in their own right. It is worth remembering, for example, that an annual income of £20 was held to be the threshold for knightly status in the period, and that relatively few lords enjoyed annual incomes greater than £100.37 It is also worth remembering that revenues like those itemized above could account for a significant portion of a town’s annual farm to the king. Ipswich, with an annual farm set at £40, actually took in more from leasing its market revenues in 1287-1288 than it paid to the king for its privileges.38 Gloucester, too, nearly managed to pay its entire farm from its toll receipts.39 Other towns were not quite as fortunate but could still expect to requite between a third and a half of their annual farm from the sums collected in toll. The very fact that kings and local officials viewed tolls as the best way
31
Henry Bush, Bristol Town Duties (Bristol: J.M. Gouch, 1828), 90-3. Shrewsbury, Shropshire Record Office, 3365/310. 33 J. C. Tingey, “The Grants of Murage to Norwich, Yarmouth, and Lynn,” Original Papers Published Under the Direction of the Committee of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, 18, part 2 (Norwich: s.n., 1913), 136. 34 R. R. Sharpe, ed., Calendar of Letter-Books Preserved Among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London, 1275-1498, 11 vols. (London: J. E. Francis, 1899-1912), Letter Book E: 273-4. 35 Calendar of the Fine Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1272-1307 (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1911), 132. 36 Turner, Town Defences, 48. 37 Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 27-48. 38 Henry L. Cannon, ed., The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Twenty-Sixth Year of the Reign of King Henry the Third (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1918), 191. 39 Cannon, ed., The Great Roll, 252. Gloucester’s farm was £60 per annum. 32
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to pay for essential public facilities is a testament to their ability to generate revenue. The best perspective on the sums generated by toll collection is, however, gained by comparing annual receipts with the rates paid for specific commodities. Most surviving toll lists can facilitate analysis along these lines, since, in addition to enumerating the commodities on which toll was collected, they also stipulate the precise payment that was due for a specific quantity of each good. The lists ordinarily do not record the price of the enumerated goods, but we have sufficient price data from other contemporary sources to establish a relationship between the actual value of the listed goods and the amount of toll each incurred. Using this method, it is possible to calculate the percentage of the likely sales price that was owed as toll, or, in other words, to establish the proportional rate of taxation on trade. Before offering such calculations, though, it is necessary to describe more carefully the nature of the source material. Carefully itemized individual statements of goods and rates characterize lists derived from both major types of tolls and the range of commodities and the units of measurement show considerable overlap. But there are a number of differences between the lists that are worth noting. Local tolls tend to place greater emphasis on the modes of carriage used to transport particular commodities: grain, for example, is often taxed by the cartload or packhorse load in local toll schedules, whereas in public works tolls it is ordinarily taxed by the quarter. In this respect local lists probably reflect more accurately the real circumstances of trade in the period. Similarly, local tolls are more likely to include entries dealing with small quantities of goods; rates applied to goods carried on a man’s back are common in lists of local tolls but rare in lists of public works tolls. In this same vein, local toll lists, at least the longer and more detailed lists, are wont to give occasional incidental details about where and how tolls were exacted, whereas lists of public works tolls convey little information beyond the commodities and rates. Overall, lists of public works tolls give a more standardized and formulaic representation of English trade, while local toll lists tend to be more idiosyncratic and reflective of unique or unusual local circumstances. In the case of public works tolls, the printed form of many of the lists gives a misleading impression about their level of specificity. The editors of the Patent Rolls, on which the grants were recorded,
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included in their standard calendars virtually the entire text of the grants made between 1220 and 1232, but then opted to save space in later calendars by omitting the lists of commodities and rates appended to grants made after 1232.40 Antiquarians and local record societies have published some of the later lists but the vast majority is accessible only by consulting the original manuscript sources. This situation is unfortunate, because the earlier lists are much shorter than later lists and often much less precise. The lists of the early thirteenth century often provide statements of rates based on cartloads or boatloads of goods rather than precise quantities; those of the later thirteenth and fourteenth century are much more carefully itemized, typically listing more than 100 separate goods, each with a separate toll rate based on a standard unit of trade, and occasionally with two or more standard units of trade. General rates for a cartload or a boatload of goods still occur sometimes, but they were hemmed in by the extensive lists of specific commodities, and also by the inclusion of specific ad valorem rates assessed on the value of merchandise that was not specifically mentioned in the list. For the purposes of the current analysis, the later lists are obviously better suited for calculating the relationship between commodity prices and toll rates. A summary of the basic information that can be extracted from extant toll lists is provided in Tables 1 and 2. Table 1 gives an overview of the rates on common trade goods documented in a selection of local toll lists, while Table 2 furnishes information about rates occurring in lists of public works tolls. The first column of each table records the type of good and the standard unit of measurement with which it appears in the lists. Subsequent columns record the toll demanded for the given standard unit of the good in a number of towns. The towns in the tables were selected partly because they have relatively extensive lists of rates and partly because
40 They did, however, continue to include entries denoting the recipients and general terms of these later grants. Their decision to omit the lists of commodities appears to have been based partly on their sheer volume. Including all of them would have significantly lengthened the published form of the calendars. It may also have been based on the knowledge that the lists often repeated information provided in earlier lists. On the issue of repetition in the lists, see Fraser, “Pattern of Trade in the North-East,” and Tingey, “Grants of murage.” This is a subject that would repay more careful investigation.
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they reflect a variety of urban types and chronological periods. The goods in the tables were selected to represent different levels of commercial activity and also to reflect some of the more prominent commodities in circulation in the period. On these grounds, grain should also have been included, but grain tolls often appear in the lists in units of measurement that are not easily comparable, making direct comparison difficult and potentially misleading. In both tables, goods that do not occur in a particular town’s list are indicated by the notation “n.d.” meaning that there is no data for that good. Goods that occur in a list but with an unusual unit of measurement are denoted by the abbreviation “n.s.” (for non-standard). Several features of the tables call for comment. First of all, it is important to note that the units of measurement in Table 1 do not always correspond with the units in Table 2: herring is usually taxed by the last of 12,000 in local lists but by the thousand in public works lists; hides are typically listed by the dicker of ten in local lists but by the single hide in public works lists; and woad is most often taxed by the ton in local lists but by the quarter in public works lists. In the case of herring and hides, it is relatively easy to convert the rates from one unit of measurement to the other, but the relationship between a ton and a quarter of woad is uncertain. Second, the rates specified in local tolls lists tend to be somewhat higher than the rates in public works lists, a feature that is particularly pronounced in the rates applied to wool and wine. This may well have been an intentional policy on the part of royal administration to make the public works tolls more palatable to the people who had to pay them. Third, the lists show a surprising degree of uniformity in the assessment of rates: a common rate for wool, for example, was 4d. per sack; a common rate for the sale of a horse was 1d.; and a common rate for a ton of wine was 4d. Even when different rates were charged they often bear a simple arithmetical relationship to the standard rate (typically half as much or twice as much as the standard rate). Such uniformity might be expected in the case of the public works tolls, which were centrally defined and organized, but it is more difficult to explain in the case of local tolls. It seems possible that local rates might have been based on some earlier commonality, perhaps a common rate associated with dues paid to the king in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. While there is much to learn by comparing the lists with each other, the primary purpose of assembling the data in Tables 1 and
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2 is to facilitate a comparison between toll rates and the actual value of the goods. This can best be done using the price data assembled by David Farmer and James Thorold Rogers.41 There are, of course, many caveats that need to be offered when making calculations of this nature. Prices tended to rise over the period as a whole, meaning that a standard, consistent toll rate constituted a higher proportion of the average sales price of a given commodity in the early thirteenth century than in the early fourteenth century. Prices of goods also fluctuated significantly from one year to the next depending on weather conditions and the presence or absence of impediments to trade such as war. Finally, the geography of production and trade could also exert an influence on the price structure, in ways that cannot be accounted for with surviving data. Comparing toll rates with average prices is indeed a useful way to assess the influence tolls might have had on trade, but surviving data would have to be far more extensive to allow for exact calculations to be made. But a general sense of the parameters within which tolls were collected is well worth having and can be calculated with some degree of confidence. The primary conclusion yielded by such an exercise is that toll rates were exceptionally low, ordinarily constituting less than one per cent of the average price of a commodity, sometimes much less.42 The average price of wool in Farmer’s index period of 1330-1347, for example, was £4 12s. 7d. per sack. According to Tables 1 and 2, a common rate for the toll on a sack of wool was 4d. Thus, the toll represents less than four-tenths of one per cent (0.36 per cent) of the average price of wool in the 1330s and 1340s. The 1330s and 1340s constituted a period of unusually low wool prices, and Farmer’s data shows that for much of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries a toll of 4d. would have comprised well below three-tenths of one per cent of the value of the wool.
41
David Farmer, “Prices and Wages,” in H. H. Hallam, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales (Cambridge: Clarendon Press, 1988), 2 (1042-1350), 779-817; James Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, 7 vols. in 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1866-1902). 42 Similar conclusions are presented in Hubert Hall, A History of the CustomsRevenue in England, 2 vols. (London: Stock, 1885), 1: 73, and Henry Cobb, ed., The Local Port Book of Southampton for 1439-40 (Southampton: The University, 1961), lxv.
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Wool appears to have been treated relatively favorably by toll collectors, but low figures can also be calculated for some of the other goods found in Tables 1 and 2: the common toll of 4d. per ton of wine represented less than four-tenths of one per cent of the average selling price in the period; the toll of one farthing on 1,000 herrings amounted to less than three-tenths of one per cent of the average price of herrings.43 The toll on horses was one of the more onerous dues among the ones summarized in Tables 1 and 2. According to Farmer’s data, a toll of 1d. constituted just over eighttenths of one per cent of the average price of a general farm horse (an affer) in the 1330s and 1340s and exactly one-half of one per cent of the average price of a carthorse in the same period. Confidence in these calculations can be increased by comparing them with occasional entries in the lists that provide ad valorem rates or other information about the values of commodities occurring in the lists.44 The London murage grant of 1315, for example, stipulates a special toll of 1d. on horses worth 40s. or more, whereas the standard toll on horses in the list is one half-penny. It also stipulates that a toll of 1d. could be charged on all merchandise worth £1 or more not specifically mentioned in the list. Norwich’s murage grant similarly mentions special tolls on a few goods with stated values: a whole cloth worth £2 or more owed 1d.; a boat carrying ale, firewood, or turves worth £1 or more owed 1d.; anyone with a trussel of merchandise worth more than 10s. owed one half-penny. The Norwich list also notes that any merchandise worth 5s. or more and not named elsewhere in the list owed a farthing. Other lists suggest that an ad valorem rate of a farthing for every 5s. worth of goods was common; the attraction of using a rate based on the principle of a penny per pound of merchandise is obvious.45 Tolls set according to this rate amount to four-tenths of one per cent of the value of the goods, a figure that is strikingly similar to the ones that can
43
The decennial average for wine in the 1330s calculated by Rogers (Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, 1: 641) was £4 12s. 9d.; the decennial average for 1,000 herrings in the same period was 9s. 3d. Rogers calculated wine prices per dozen gallons. I converted his price into a price per tun of 252 gallons. Wholesale prices per tun would, of course, have been lower, meaning that the proportion represented by toll would have been higher. 44 See the Appendix for the sources on which this paragraph is based. 45 E.g. Dublin murage tolls in 1308; Gloucester pavage tolls in 1332; Southampton local tolls in 1329.
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be calculated by comparing standard toll rates with prevailing commodity prices. An important exception to the general rule of low toll rates applied to traders who operated on a small scale. Part of the reason toll rates are so low in surviving lists is that the units of measurement were ordinarily quite large, meaning that the value of the goods on which toll was levied was correspondingly high. A sack of wool, for example, represented the clip of about 260 sheep. It was the common unit used in international trade conducted by wealthy merchants and is the most common unit to appear in surviving toll lists. But for the millions of peasant producers responsible for the bulk of England’s wool production, it represented commercial activity on a scale beyond their normal experience. At the local level, wool was typically traded in units of pounds and stones, and toll represented a higher share of the value of sales transactions. Extant toll lists have less information about the tolls imposed on this level of trade than on the trade conducted by wealthier merchants. Typically, they specify rates for the more humble branches of trade based on how goods were carried into the market rather than on precise units of measurement. But they do occasionally furnish more precise details about the treatment of local trade, enough to signal the likelihood that peasants and small scale traders had to pay higher proportional rates than did the merchants engaged in longerdistance trade. The extensive list in the Ipswich Domesday Book provides particularly good evidence for differential toll rates applied to smaller scale trade. Merchants who shipped a sack of wool from the quay could expect to pay 4d., but if they shipped a last of wool (equal to 12 sacks) they had to pay only 8d. In other words, they could ship twelve times the amount of wool and pay only twice the amount of toll. Those who sold wool in the wool market confronted a sliding scale depending on the mode of transport used: a cartload paid 2d.; a packhorse paid one half-penny and a person carrying a backpack of wool paid one farthing. These rates seem to be on a par with the rate charged per sack, if one accepts that a human was capable of carrying at least 23 pounds in a pack, or that a horse could be saddled with twice that amount. But a fourth rate also applied in the wool market: a farthing would be collected from anyone who sold wool worth 2.5d. This unusually precise rate probably represented the value of a single fleece of low to middling quality, the
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kind of good that a peasant with a cottage and a few acres of land might occasionally bring for sale.46 As a simple ad valorem rate the toll amounts to ten per cent of the value of the wool. But it seems unlikely that many people would have been forced to pay such a steep rate. Since the farthing payment was the same for a single fleece as for an entire backpack, the rate dropped precipitously with each additional fleece sold. Thus, someone selling two fleeces would have paid approximately five per cent of the value of the wool in toll and someone with five fleeces would have paid less than two per cent. To reach the level at which the rate would have approximated that paid by merchants, an individual would have had to be able to sell the wool from a flock of about 15 sheep. Many peasants had flocks of this size and larger, but such peasants were generally among the better off members of a village.47 Regressive rates can also be found in the Ipswich tolls imposed on hides. The standard rate in Ipswich was 4d. for a dicker of ten hides, an unusually high rate by the standards of other towns. But the high rate per dicker melted away with increased volume, so that a merchant who shipped as many as 100 hides (a half-last) paid the same amount as someone who dealt in a single dicker. Conversely, the rate per unit was much higher on small transactions: an individual who sold a single hide had to pay one half-penny. Thus, someone who sold eight hides had to pay as much in toll as someone who carried 100 hides into the town. According to the data collected by Thorold Rogers for the early fourteenth century, a single unprocessed ox hide typically fetched a price of approximately 2s., while raw horse hides were worth about half as much.48 Prices varied significantly from one year to another and even between different sets of accounts in the same year, but the decennial averages calculated by Rogers suggest that a half-penny toll would have amounted to a bit more than two per cent of the value of a single oxhide and a bit more than four per cent of the value of a single horsehide.
46 A single fleece probably weighed a bit less than 1.5 lbs., and according to David Farmer’s data, would have sold for about 4d. in the 1330s and 1340s. On fleece weights see E. M. Carus-Wilson and O. Coleman, England’s Export Trade 1275-1547 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 13. 47 Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants, and Markets, 42-54. 48 Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, 2: 451.
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The Payers of Toll Comparison between toll rates and commodity values reveals that the rates were extraordinarily low but also suggests that tolls may have affected different social groups in different ways. Any attempt to assess the relationship between tolls and trade clearly needs to take this social variability into account, and the best way to do so is to look at the practices of toll collection. Of particular importance is the issue of who actually paid the rates specified in the lists. Were the principal payers the wealthy merchants who traded goods such as cloth and wine in wholesale quantities over long distances, or were they mainly the humble peasants of a town’s rural hinterland who needed to sell a few pounds of wool in order to pay their rent? It has often been suggested that peasants inhabiting the hinterland of towns and prominent rural markets and other smaller scale traders inhabiting the market site were particularly prone to paying tolls, and that their payments accounted for the lion’s share of the income raised by toll collectors.49 This view is based mainly on indirect evidence derived from sources dealing with exemptions from toll, exemptions that were widespread in the period. Local merchants who were freemen of a town or members of the town’s merchant gild, for example, ordinarily traded without tolls in their own town. Merchants from other towns were also sometimes exempted from tolls, if their own town had a royal charter granting exemption. Larger monasteries were also common recipients of royal grants of exemption. Peasants and other petty traders in the town were, on the other hand, seldom endowed with such privileges. A few select groups of peasants were able to establish and enforce toll exemptions—principally tenants of royal demesne and, occasionally, the tenants of some ecclesiastical estates—but the vast majority of peasants and artisans had little choice but to pay the farthings and half-pennies demanded at the gates and in the marketplaces where they conducted their business. While there is little doubt that peasants and artisans were major contributors of tolls, their role as toll payers needs a great deal of 49 Gras, Early English Customs System, 26; K. M. E. Murray, ed., Register of Daniel Rough, Common Clerk of Romney 1353-1380, Kent Records 16 (Ashford: Records Branch [of the Kent Archaeological Society], 1945), xix; Maryanne Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 200-1.
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qualification. For one thing, it is important to keep in mind that the term “peasant” is extraordinarily broad, ranging from small cottagers who might have only a single fleece to sell in any given year to wealthy virgate-holding tenants who were likely to have dozens of fleeces to sell at one time. For wealthier peasants—the ones most likely to be implicated in the commercial economy—the regressive scale found in some of the toll lists may not have caused much concern, certainly not as much as it would have for poorer peasants and artisans. Anyone in a position to take a full cartload of grain to market or to sell wool in units of stones rather than pounds would have enjoyed a toll rate closer to the one enjoyed by merchants than the one enjoyed by smallholders and artisans. The extent to which merchants managed to escape tolls because of their chartered exemptions also needs careful scrutiny. There is certainly a good deal of evidence to suggest that merchants were adamant about asserting their right to exemption and vigilant about protecting it, but there were limits to the exemptions. Indeed, anyone who reads the individual entries of a surviving toll list would be hard pressed to form the impression that the trade of merchants was not a major concern of the framers of such lists. Many goods occurring in the lists were clearly the commercial preserve of merchants rather than of peasants or artisans: dyestuffs, for example, or metals, or other imported goods. Equally revealing is the presence of so many entries dealing with wholesale quantities of goods: herring assessed by the thousand and almost as commonly by the last of 12,000; hides assessed by the dicker of ten and often by the last of 200; wooden boards (frequently imported from Ireland or the Baltic) assessed in units of 100 and only rarely in smaller amounts. Even farm commodities routinely occur in relatively large units. Rates for ten sheep, for example, are more common than rates for single sheep, and other common units of measurement in the lists include five flitches of pork, 2,000 onions, 100 rabbit skins, and a wey of cheese (336 lbs.). Such large units are particularly characteristic of lists of public works tolls, but local lists also devote a surprising amount of space to quantities that are clearly implicated in trade at a wholesale level. A desire to target foreign merchants explains at least some of this emphasis on imported goods and wholesale quantities. Foreigners accounted for a significant share of English trade throughout the Middle Ages and were particularly prominent in the thirteenth and
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early fourteenth centuries when most of the surviving toll lists were written.50 From the perspective of an English toll collector, they were also ideally suited to pay toll: their status as toll payers was simple and straightforward, they were less likely to have corporate support to fend off demands for toll, and they had the ability to pay. It was not in anyone’s interest to abuse foreign traders by demanding excessive payments for the right to trade, but vigorous enforcement of dues that were either customary or sanctioned by the king was certainly well worth the effort, and probably accounts for a significant share of the figures for toll income given above. In 1303, however, the toll paying status of foreign merchants underwent drastic revision with the issue of the Carta Mercatoria, an edict designed to protect the interests of foreign merchants in return for their agreement to contribute to a new national customs duty.51 One of the key provisions of the document stipulated that foreigners were henceforth to be exempt from all levies of murage, pontage, and pavage throughout England. Exemption from the payment of local tolls was not included in the grant and appears not to have been claimed subsequently. This abrupt change in status with respect to public works tolls raises a perplexing problem, though. If foreign merchants were the only significant merchant group paying these tolls, one would expect to find a significant change in the nature of the toll lists drawn up after 1303, as well as a precipitous decline in the revenues yielded by public works tolls. Neither of these propositions finds much support in surviving documentation: the emphasis on mercantile exchange is every bit as prominent in later lists as in the earlier ones, and murage receipts remained healthy in the early fourteenth century, although the number of surviving accounts is too small to allow a categorical conclusion on this point. Another possibility worth considering is that English merchants were not quite as successful at evading tolls as the evidence regarding the enforcement of their privileges might suggest. Native merchants could be forced to pay toll in several different ways. First of 50 M. Prestwich, “Italian Merchants in Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth-Century England,” in The Dawn of Modern Banking (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979); T. H. Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England in the High Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); Joseph P. Huffman, Family, Commerce, and Religion in London and Cologne: Anglo-German Emigrants, c. 1000-c. 1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). 51 Gras, Early English Customs System, 257-64.
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all, royal exemptions were conditional rather than universal and toll collectors were able to ignore the exemption privileges of many of the merchants who passed through their town gates. They were entitled to do so because of a legal doctrine that placed great weight on the date on which an exemption was first granted, a doctrine that is sometimes referred to as “priority of seisin” or “priority of charter.”52 Grants of toll exempt status could not be applied retroactively, meaning that they were not valid in towns or markets that had a preexisting right to collect tolls. Thus, the merchants of Ipswich, who acquired their exemption in 1200, could expect to trade free of toll in King’s Lynn, which acquired its formal right to collect tolls when it became a borough in 1204, but not in Norwich, which could trace its collection rights back to its acquisition of its borough farm in 1194.53 According to the data assembled by Adolphus Ballard, dozens of towns acquired toll exemptions so late that their privileges would have been viable in very few of the major towns and rural markets of the kingdom. By the end of King John’s reign in 1216, for example, virtually all of the major towns in the kingdom and several hundred rural markets had established their right to collect toll, but the list of towns that lacked formal exemption privileges at that time includes such places as Coventry, Huntingdon, Leicester, and Worcester, along with many other smaller towns.54 Priority of seisin was, in fact, less straightforward than legal theory might suggest. First of all, rights and privileges could lapse through lack of use. If the first merchants to trade in a particular town did not insist on their rights, then other merchants from that town could not do so, even if their exemption charter predated the other town’s right to collect.55 Second, exemptions from toll were almost always conveyed by specific words in a formal charter, but the right to collect tolls was not always specifically mentioned in a royal act. Many of the older and larger towns in the kingdom had prescriptive 52
Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants, and Markets, 111-16. Ballard, ed., British Borough Charters, 1: cxli, cxliii. 54 Ballard, ed., British Borough Charters, 1: cxxxviii-cxlvii; 2: xc-cii. On the degree of commercial development before 1216 see Langdon and Masschaele, “Commercial Activity and Population Growth,” 42-54. 55 George Woodbine, ed., Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, trans. Samuel Thorne (Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), 2: 166-73. 53
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rights to collect tolls based on usage that went back to the AngloSaxon period. Some, but not all of these towns, also acquired the farm of their boroughs in specific royal acts, and the date on which they acquired the farm typically became the date used to determine priority of seisin vis-à-vis other towns who enjoyed chartered exemption rights. How priority of seisin would have been determined in places that never acquired a formal charter granting the farm of their borough—including some major commercial centers such as Bristol—is an open question. Ambiguities in the possession of collection rights might also explain cases in which towns agreed to compromise in toll disputes in which the issue of priority of seisin appears to have been clear-cut. In 1239, for example, the town of Southampton agreed to stop collecting tolls from the merchants of Marlborough, “notwithstanding that the charter of our [i.e. the king’s] men of Southampton is prior to that of our men of Marlborough.”56 The relevant charters for both towns are still extant, and they show that Southampton did indeed have the legal right to demand toll, since it acquired the farm of its borough in 1199 and Marlborough acquired its right of exemption in 1205.57 A second important limitation on the universality of exemption privileges applied in the case of public works tolls. In theory, the principle of priority of seisin should have meant that relatively few English merchants contributed to public works tolls, since the grants of such tolls typically postdated the acquisition of chartered exemptions: the vast majority of English towns had already secured exemption rights by the time kings began to make murage grants. But exemptions that originated as a means to deal with local tolls did not necessarily extend to public works tolls. The limited character of toll exemptions is well illustrated by King Henry III’s grant of exemption from murage to the inhabitants of Shrewsbury and Kings’ Lynn in the 1260s as a reward for their support during the Barons’
56
Ballard and Tait, eds., British Borough Charters, 2: 257-8. Ballard, ed., British Borough Charters, 1: cxliii, cxliv. In the fourteenth century, Southampton made a similar compromise with the merchants of Salisbury, agreeing to forego its priority of seisin in order to reach agreement about how the two towns would collect toll from each other’s merchants. P. Studer, ed., The Oak Book of Southampton, 2 vols., Publications of the Southampton Record Society, nos. 10 and 11 (Southampton: Southampton Record Society, 1910-11), 2: 1-17. 57
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Revolt.58 Both towns had acquired general toll exemptions much earlier, Lynn in 1204 and Shrewsbury in 1227, but it is clear that the general exemptions had not extended to the most common form of public work toll.59 In the case of King’s Lynn, the newly acquired exemption from murage was valid only for five years; even the expansion of toll privileges was kept within strict limits. A similar process of enhancing and extending exemption privileges probably also helps to explain the subtle changes in language one commonly finds in royal confirmations of previously granted borough charters.60 Early urban charters usually specify that the town’s privileged members were henceforth to be free from teloneum, the generic Latin word for toll; later confirmations usually stipulate that the exemption covers murage, pavage, pontage (and sometimes other dues like stallage) as well as teloneum. A confirmation in 1348 of a charter originally granted to the town of Huntingdon in 1205, for example, states in the preamble that the burgesses “fear that they may be in future impeached touching liberties and customs which they have hitherto used under ... general words” and then goes on to enumerate various tolls and dues which were not specifically included in the 1205 charter.61 Uncertainty about the extent of exemption privileges conveyed in general grants is also manifest in an inquest into murage collection in Newcastle in 1281. In the course of the inquest, a jury noted that local merchants, who “should have paid murage on their merchandise ... in the same way as foreigners,” stopped doing so six months after collection had begun in the town.62 The Newcastle inquest is particularly interesting, because the jurors mentioned in
58
Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, AD 1258-1266 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1910), 455-6; Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, AD 1266-1272 (London: H.M. Stationery Office 1913), 214. 59 Ballard, ed., British Borough Charters, 1: 188; 2: 255. 60 Calendar of Charter Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office (London: H.M. Stationery Office 1908), 3 (1300-1326), 9, 100, 217. Many more examples could be offered. 61 Calendar of the Charter Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office(London: H.M. Stationery Office 1916), 5 (1341-1417), 94-5. A similarly explicit confirmation was made in the same year for the town of Hedon (Calendar of the Charter Rolls, 5 (1341-1417), 88). 62 Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous (Chancery) Preserved in the Public Record Office (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1916), 1: 366.
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passing that local merchants stopped contributing when they learned that merchants in Lincoln and York did not pay murage in their home towns.63 The Newcastle verdict suggests that the issue was still up in the air in the 1280s, long after the inauguration of public works tolls. It also implies that even on a merchant’s home turf, where privileges were most securely held, exemptions from toll were not necessarily ironclad. The third and final limit to the exemption rights of English merchants worth considering is simply that merchants did not always insist on the letter of the law.64 Fighting for recognition of privileges was usually an arduous affair that risked reprisals and protracted court battles. Towns frequently undertook the task of litigating on behalf of an individual who had been forced to pay toll in contravention of the town’s charter, and there is certainly no shortage of examples documenting their commitment to defending their chartered rights. But these manifestations of corporate vigilance and assertiveness in defense of toll exemptions have some curious features. Litigation sometimes recurs between two towns even after a royal court has issued a definitive ruling on their respective toll rights. Litigation also sometimes occurs long after commercial relationships had begun; in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries towns were still engaging in disputes related to priority of seisin and still invoking late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century charters when doing so. One can legitimately wonder if the lingering lack of certainty manifested in these types of litigation might have been caused by the willingness of individual merchants to pay a few pennies for the right to trade rather than to enter into a lengthy dispute by insisting on their formal privileges. A merchant of Norwich made just such a decision in 1286 and was fined for his behavior in his local court. The court entry notes that he paid toll in markets and fairs “of his own accord” and thus damaged the town’s liberties.65 The temptation simply to get on with one’s affairs must 63 It is interesting to note that both Lincoln and York were particularly turbulent in the 1280s and 1290s and that much of the turbulence had to do with what the king and the less privileged members of the town were wont to describe as oppressive abuses of their privileged status within their respective towns. 64 E. Lipson, The Economic History of England, 5th ed. (London: Black, 1929), 1: 257. 65 William Hudson, ed., Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich during the
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have been considerable, and giving in to the temptation must likewise have been common enough to obscure what in theory should have been clear and unassailable commercial privileges. Thus, while peasants in hinterland villages and petty urban traders who were neither full citizens nor gild members undoubtedly featured prominently among the payers of toll, they were by no means the only groups affected by the taxation of trade. The only statement that can be made with complete confidence on the matter is that the merchants who dominated gilds and town governments of the period ordinarily did not pay local tolls in their own town. (Had they not been exempt, the revenues cited above would have been significantly higher than they actually were, since local merchants were the most active commercial presence in every town’s market.) But when they traded in another town, or even when they traded in their own town while public works tolls were being collected, the situation became murkier. In these situations exemptions were often claimed and often even allowed; they were, however, neither universal nor infallible. Exemptions were an important element of the period’s commercial mix, but they were sufficiently circumscribed that merchants, even English merchants, frequently contended with demands for toll payments in the conduct of their business. The payment of toll was, in short, an issue that touched a relatively broad constituency.
The Impact of Tolls on Trade The breadth of this constituency probably goes a good way toward explaining the sensitivity to tolls that can be found in the period. Medieval people were well aware that the level of toll rates could affect trade volumes and general prosperity. The founders of new markets, for example, sometimes encouraged traders to use their facilities by lowering or eliminating the tolls they were entitled to collect, applying an economic rationale that is strikingly similar to the reduced sales taxes offered in “urban enterprise zones” in many American cities today.66 The effectiveness of such a strategy can be
XIIIth and XIVth Centuries, Selden Society, vol. 5 (London: B. Quaritch, 1892), 29-30. 66 Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants, and Markets, 68-9.
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seen in a dispute over market rights in Lancashire: the abbot of Furness maintained that his market in Dalton was losing much of its trade because the holder of the market in Ulverston did not require traders to pay toll there, and the court accepted his argument and quashed the upstart market.67 In a similar vein, the towns of Cockermouth and Grimsby presented formal parliamentary petitions pleading for the king to shut down nearby commercial sites where trading occurred without the payment of toll, claiming that their towns were greatly impoverished by the loss of revenue.68 One has to allow for some hyperbole in these petitions, but the behavior they describe and the measures they take to deal with the problem suggest great sensitivity to the practices of toll collection. This sensitivity is harder to account for than might appear at first glance. Indeed, it is somewhat puzzling to contemplate the frequency of surviving toll disputes in light of the fact that toll rates were so low. Nobody likes to pay taxes and perhaps one need go no further than a general anti-tax sentiment to explain the sensitivity to tolls encountered in the period. But the vehemence and perseverance with which toll rights were contested suggests that something more than bellyaching about taxes was going on. The exaction of tolls— even tolls set at very low rates—was a serious matter, one that raised important economic issues for the parties involved. The import of these issues can best be studied by disentangling the different interests of collectors and payers. The economic interests of the collectors of tolls are probably the easiest to diagnose. They had a natural desire to maximize their income. This can be viewed as a byproduct of simple greed, although the wealthy merchants who controlled town governments also claimed to be acting in the interests of the community, since the proceeds from tolls were used to underwrite their town’s annual farm and to finance the building and repair of its walls, streets and bridges. Whatever the motivation, achieving maximum income from tolls required careful policy decisions. Raising rates was seldom an option because of the general unwillingness to accept modifications to custom, meaning that the central policy decisions revolved around
67 William Farrer and J. Brownbill, eds., The Victoria History of the County of Lancaster, 8 vols. (London: Constable, 1906-1914), 8: 350. 68 John Strachey et al., ed., Rotuli Parliamentorum; ut et Petitiones et Placita in Parliamento, Record Commission, 6 vols. (London: s.n., 1783), 1: 197, 412.
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questions of who should be made to pay the customary rates and what sorts of transactions could be treated as subject to payments of toll. Even in these areas, though, toll collectors had to limit the scope of their ambitions. By the middle of the thirteenth century at the latest, commercial venues were so numerous that buyers and sellers were often able to choose where to conduct their business. If traders deemed a town’s toll collectors too aggressive or too arbitrary, they would vote with their feet and revenues would suffer as a result: medieval commerce was remarkably adept at relocating in response to relatively small marginal incentives. A loss of trade meant more than a loss of toll income; it could also mean a loss of rental income, a loss of spin-off business, and a dearth of provisions for the inhabitants of the town. Thus while maximizing current revenues was certainly a high priority, those vested with authority over tolls also paid heed to broader concerns about the economic health of their town. In these circumstances, the best toll policy was one that was vigorous but not overly zealous. Finding the right balance could not have been an easy thing to do. For local traders active in retail and small-scale trade, even relatively low rates of toll could have a significant impact on household income. The regressive rates found in many toll schedules suggest that the toll payments of smaller traders constituted a higher proportion of their market income than was true of wealthier merchants. But the real issue for people who sold goods in small amounts was probably the frequency with which they had to pay toll rather than the regressive character of the rate schedule. Those who purchased foodstuffs and other basic necessities were ordinarily exempt, but those who sold simple commodities often had to comply with demands for toll, depending on the item and the scale of the transaction. Many towns sold licenses to butchers, bakers, and other artisans in lieu of collecting tolls on every transaction—a policy most familiar from the routine fining of brewers and tapsters—but such licenses were seldom available outside the food trades. Nor were they ordinarily available to the peasants, victualers and petty traders who resided in the town’s hinterland. These extramural traders were, however, less dependent on a single market than were the artisans and retailers living inside the walls, and they may have seen their greater choice in marketing venue as preferable to the payment of a standard licensing fee. Wholesale merchants had the luxury of viewing tolls from the perspective of the profitability of their trading ventures rather than
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their immediate effect on household income, but like smaller-scale local traders their primary concern was more the frequency with which tolls had to be paid than the absolute rate imposed in any single place. One might sympathize, for example, with the plight of a wool merchant, whose best sources of supply were in the west and north of England, but whose primary shipping depots were in the east. When carting his goods across the country, he was likely to pass through one or more towns vested with the right to collect murage or pontage, and several others that might endeavor to impose local tolls on the wool. Further tolls were also likely to be due in the port from which the wool was shipped: Southampton, for example, collected toll on all goods that passed through the town on the way to its port and even collected toll twice if the goods were not only brought into the town but sold there as well.69 Merchants sometimes sought detours around towns as a way of reducing the number of tolls they had to pay, but towns took countermeasures by setting up collecting stations at crossroads situated many miles from the town.70 We do not have itemized business records to establish just how often toll was paid by any particular trader, but it is possible to establish how often a merchant would have encountered demands for toll at any given time. In the year 1300, for example, no fewer than 22 English towns were authorized to collect public works tolls, while hundreds of other towns and rural markets had the right to collect local tolls.71 Merchants with good exemption privileges were probably able to avoid most local tolls, but public works tolls were another matter; they were hard to shirk and sufficiently widespread to make a real difference in a merchant’s bottom line. The great proliferation of tolls that characterized the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is, consequently, a particularly important issue to address when assessing how tolls affected the overall health of
69
Cobb, ed., Local Port Book of Southampton, xii. Donald Sutherland, ed., The Eyre of Northamptonshire, 3-4 Edward III, A.D. 1329-30, 2 vols., Selden Society vols. 97, 98 (London: Selden Society, 1981-82), 1: 243-44; Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous (Chancery) (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1916), 1: 315-16. 71 The number of public works tolls in effect in 1300 has been calculated from entries in Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, AD 1292-1301 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1895), passim. Dublin, Drogheda, and Clonmel are not included. 70
1
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the commercial economy in the period. Since it was the English crown that introduced and expanded the use of public works tolls, one could reasonably conclude that royal policy posed a considerable threat to the viability of commerce in the period. Indeed, one might even see a continuum in royal interference in trade relations over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, one that began with the introduction of public works tolls in the 1210s, continued through the imposition of a national customs system under Edward I, and ultimately led in the fourteenth century to the system of staple ports and bullionism so well described by John Munro.72 But in the case of tolls, at least, the relationship between royal policy and commercial development is more complex than such a trajectory might suggest. For though the Crown was largely responsible for extending the use of tolls, it was also committed to keeping them within reasonable limits. This commitment can be seen in several ways. Public works tolls were, for example, carefully monitored to make sure that the money they produced actually went to the projects they were intended to fund. The policy of limiting their duration to a specified number of years points in the same direction. It is worth noting in this regard that the terminal dates of surviving murage accounts indicate that towns adhered closely to the terms defined in their grants. Many towns received extensions of their terms, but their request for an extension was often accompanied by a scrutiny of what had been done with the earlier grant and sometimes even an assessment of the condition of the walls or streets earmarked for improvement.73 At times, the crown would even consider how a new set of tolls might affect the general level of tolls in a particular town or area. In 1324, Edward II turned down an entreaty from the burgesses of Scarborough to add murage and pavage dues to those they were already collecting for the repair of the town’s quay, noting that “it would be too great a burden to people to have murage and pontage in the same place where there is quayage.”74 72 John Munro, Wool, Cloth, and Gold. The Struggle for Bullion in AngloBurgundian Trade 1340-1478 (Brussels and Toronto: Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles 1972). 73 Royal oversight is particularly well documented in the multiple murage grants obtained by Dublin. J. T. Gilbert, ed., Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland A.D. 1171-1320, Rolls Series 53 (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1870). 74 Strachey, Rotuli Parliamentorum, 1: 423.
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In a similar vein, the crown made an effort to ensure that toll rates remained at low levels. This is apparent in the care taken to define rates when making grants of public works tolls and also in the policy of setting those rates below the customary local rates charged in towns and markets. It also found more general expression in a broad supervision of toll collection practices throughout the kingdom as a whole. As early as 1201, a lawsuit was filed in the king’s court to challenge what the plaintiffs described as a change in toll rates collected in a local market.75 Similar cases can be found throughout the thirteenth century and were common enough to lead King Edward I to include a clause dealing with toll rates in the First Statute of Westminster of 1275.76 In the statute, the king denounced those who collected “outrageous toll, contrary to the common custom of the realm,” and threatened to terminate the rights of any market-holder who charged rates that were deemed to be too high. Numerous enquiries related to the statute can be found in the Hundred Rolls of 1274 and the quo warranto pleas of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In 1330, for example, a lengthy quo warranto investigation of commercial practices in Derby established that the town required people residing outside the county to pay rates that were twice as high as those paid by inhabitants of the county.77 The town’s privileges were suspended as a result and reinstated only after the payment of a heavy fine and a promise to end the practice of collecting “excessive” rates. Many similar examples of the crown’s willingness to regulate methods of toll collection and to intervene on behalf of those who paid toll could be offered.78 The salient point, however, is not simply that Angevin kings sometimes acted to protect the interests of toll payers; it is rather that their commitment to action fostered an economic environment in which people by and large respected the rules of the game. Toll collectors sometimes acted in ways that were arbitrary and capricious, but on the whole their behavior was based 75
C. T. Flower, ed., Curia Regis Rolls of the Reign of Richard I and John (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1922), 1: 449-50. 76 Statutes of the Realm (London: G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1810; reprint London: Dawson of Pall Mall,1963), 1: 34 (Statute of Westminster I, c. 31). 77 W. Illingworth and J. Caley, eds., Placita de Quo Warranto, Record Commission (London: G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1818), 160-61. 78 Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants, and Markets, 109-20, has many examples but is not exhaustive.
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on an ingrained acceptance of custom and routine rather than a willful flouting of rules. Even when disputes arose over aggressive toll collection, they usually involved calculated actions undertaken to stretch rather than break conventional boundaries. In other words, the form of both public prosecution and private litigation suggests that people by and large accepted the existence of norms governing the rates that could be charged and the circumstances under which toll could be demanded. In most economies, the regularity and predictability of the costs born in trade matter at least as much as the absolute level of those costs. In the circumstances of medieval commerce, tolls had the potential to undermine people’s ability to make rational cost calculations in the conduct of trade, since they were so widespread and so important to the bodies that collected them. Ultimately they did not play that role, at least not in England. They were prevented from doing so by an effective assertion of public authority. The crown was not capable of ensuring cost certainty for traders under its jurisdiction, but it did manage to establish relatively narrow limits within which uncertainty fluctuated. And in the circumstances of the time, it must be added, that was no mean feat.
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APPENDIX A Handlist of Medieval English Toll Lists Prior to AD 1350 in Published Sources
A. Lists of Customary Local Tolls Lewes, 1086
Domesday-Book, seu Liber Censualis Willelmi Primi Regis Angliae, ed. Abraham Farley, 2 vols. (London: s.n., 1783), 1: 26a.
London, late eleventh cent.
N. S. B. Gras, The Early English Customs System (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1918), 153-5.
Newcastle, 1100-1135
The Percy Chartulary, ed. M. T. Martin, Surtees Society 117 (Durham: Published for the Society by Andrews and Co., 1911), 333-4.
Cardiff, 1147-1183
British Borough Charters, 1042-1216, ed. A. Ballard (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1913), 177-78.
Yaxley, 1201
Curia Regis Rolls of the Reigns of Richard I and John, ed. C. T. Flower, 7 vols. (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 19231935), 1: 449-50.
Torksey, 1228
Gras, Early English Customs System, 155-8.
Exeter, c. 1240
The Anglo-Norman Customal of Exeter, ed. J. W. Schopp and R. C. Easterling (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1925), 24. The list is incomplete.
Okehampton, 1194-1242
British Borough Charters, ed. Ballard, 178.
Southwark, 1266
Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous (Chancery) preserved in the Public Record Office, 1226-1377, 3 vols. (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1916-1937), 1: 103.
London, 1266
Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis: Liber Albus, Liber Custumarum, et Liber Horn, ed. H. T. Riley, Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages no. 12, 3 vols. in 4 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859-62), 1: 229-36.
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Dartmouth, 1272
Rotuli Hundredorum temporibus Henrici III et Edwardi I in Turri Londinensi et in Curia Receptae Scacarii Westmonasterii Asservati, ed. W. Illingworth and J. Caley, Record Commission, 2 vols. (London, 1812-1818), 1: 90.
Hornsea, 1272
Rotuli Hundredorum, 1: 106.
Winchester, c. 1275
The Ancient Usages of the City of Winchester, ed. J. S. Furley (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1927), 32-42.
Huntingdon, 1286
Placita de Quo Warranto, ed. W. Illingworth and J. Caley, Record Commission (London: Eyre and Strahan, 1818), 302.
Fordwich, ante 1290
C. E. Woodruff, A History of the Town and Port of Fordwich (Canterbury: Cross and Jackman, [1895]), 32-5. (Dated on the basis of references to Jews).
King's Lynn, c. 1290
Dorothy Owen, The Making Of King's Lynn, Records of Social and Economic History, new series 9 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 99-102.
Ipswich, 1291
Black Book of the Admiralty with an Appendix, ed. Travis Twiss, Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages no. 55, 4 vols. (London: Public Record Office, 1871-76), 2 (Appendix, Part 2): 184-207.
Bristol, c. 1300
The Great Red Book of Bristol, ed. E. M. W. Veale, Bristol Record Society Publications, vols. 2, 4, 8, 16, 18 (Bristol: Bristol Corporation, 1931-53), 4: 90-1. Rates applied only to trade with Southampton.
Norwich, c. 1300
The Records of the City of Norwich, ed. William Hudson and John Tingey, 2 vols. (Norwich: Jarrold and Sons, 19061910), 2: 199-205.
Romney, c. 1300(?)
Register of Daniel Rough, ed. K. M. E. Murray, Kent Records 16 (Ashford: Printed for the Records Branch [of the Kent Archaeological Society], 1945), 28-35.
Sandwich, c. 1300
William Boys, Collection for an History of Sandwich (Canterbury: By Author, 1792), 435-40.
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Southampton, c. 1300
The Oak Book of Southampton, ed. P. Studer, 2 vols., Publications of the Southampton Record Society nos. 10 and 11 (Southampton: Record Society, 1910-11), 2: 2-17.
Berwick, 1303
Gras, Early English Customs System, 164-7.
Ipswich, 1303
Gras, Early English Customs System, 159-63.
London, 1272-1307
Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, ed. Riley, 1: 223-9.
Manchester, 1320
Mamecestre: Being Chapters From the Early Recorded History ... of Manchester, ed. John Harland, Chetham Society vols. 53, 56, and 58, 3 vols. (Manchester: s.n., 1861-1862), 2: 282-3.
Chester, 1321
Rupert H. Morris, Chester in the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns (Chester: The Author, n.d.), 554-58.
Southampton, 1329
Oak Book of Southampton, ed. Studer, 18-27. Rates applied only to trade with Salisbury.
Derby, 1330
Placita de Quo Warranto, ed. Illingworth and Caley, 160-1.
Measham, 1330 Placita de Quo Warranto, ed. Illingworth and Caley, 146. Bakewell, 1330
Placita de Quo Warranto, ed. Illingworth and Caley, 140.
Oundle, 1330
Placita de Quo Warranto, ed. Illingworth and Caley, 553.
Peterborough, 1330
Placita de Quo Warranto, ed. Illingworth and Caley, 552.
Ipswich, 1340
Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous (Chancery) Preserved in the Public Record Office (London: Public Record Office, 1916), 2: 421.
B. Public Works Tolls Note: The editors of the patent rolls included lists of tolls granted to finance public works in the volumes covering the years 1216-1225 and 1225-1232. Subsequent volumes calendared the grants of tolls, but did not include the lists of commodities and rates appended to the grants. A number of these
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later lists have, however, been published in other venues. Rather than record each early list separately, I have summarized the material available in the early volumes of the printed calendar, and then furnished individual entries for later lists. Great Britain, Public Record Office, Patent Rolls of the Reign of Henry III Preserved in the Public Record Office, A.D. 1216-1225 (London: Public Record Office, 1901): Shrewsbury, 1220 (238-9); Waterford, 1224 (433); Shrewsbury, 1224 (445); Stafford, 1224 (459); Northampton, 1224 (499); Scarborough, 1225 (508-9); Lincoln, 1225 (518); Worcester, 1225 (555-6). Great Britain, Public Record Office, Patent Rolls of the Reign of Henry III Preserved in the Public Record Office, A.D. 1225-1232 (London: Public Record Office, 1903): York, 1226 (32); Bridgnorth, 1227 (116); “Feria” bridge, Yorkshire, 1227 (173-4); Drogheda Bridge, 1227 (182); Hereford, 1228 (228); Worcester, 1229 (253); Hereford, 1230 (343); Hithe, 1232 (477); Gloucester, 1232 (479); Bristol, 1232 (483). London murage, 1279
Calendar of Letter Books Preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall. Letter-Books A-F, ed. Reginald Sharpe (London: E.J. Francis, 18991904), Letter Book A, 222-3.
Dublin murage, 1284
Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland, A.D. 1172-1320, ed. J. T. Gilbert, Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages no. 53 (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1870), 189-90.
Dublin murage, 1295
Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland, ed. Gilbert, 191-4.
Dublin murage, 1297
Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland, ed. Gilbert, 194-5.
Dublin pavage, 13021303
Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland, ed. Gilbert, 218-21.
Dublin murage, 1308
Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland, ed. Gilbert, 270-3.
Dublin murage, 1312
Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland, ed. Gilbert, 308-12.
London murage, 1315
Calendar of Letter Books, ed. Sharpe, Letter Book E, 63-6.
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Peterborough pavage, 1315
Peterborough Local Administration, ed. W. T. Mellows, Northampton Record Society 9 (Northampton: s.n., 1939), 233-4.
Drogheda murage, 1318
Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland, ed. Gilbert, 413-17.
Newark pavage, 1328
England from 1000 to 1760, ed. H. E. S. Fisher and A. R. J. Jurica, Documents in English Economic History (London: G. Bell, 1977), 237-8.
Bristol quayage, 1331
Henry Bush, Bristol Town Duties (Bristol: J. M.Gutch, 1828), 88-9.
Peterborough pontage, 1334
Peterborough Local Administration, ed. Mellows, 233-4.
Gloucester pavage, 1334
Calendar of the Records of the Corporation of Gloucester, ed. W. H. Stevenson (Gloucester: J. Bellows, 1893), 50-2.
Gloucester murage, 1345
Calendar of the Records of the Corporation of Gloucester, ed. Stevenson, 54-5.
C. Fair Tolls St. Ives, 1252
Ellen Wedemeyer Moore, The Fairs of Medieval England. An Introductory Study, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Studies and Texts 72 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985), 197.
Winchester, 1349
A Charter of Edward the Third Confirming and Enlarging the Privileges of St. Giles Fair, Winchester, AD 1349 (Winchester: s.n., 1886), 39-40. Summarized in Moore, Fairs of Medieval England, 197.
x
x
x
EXPENDITURE AND WAR
x
x
x
CALCULATING PROFITS AND LOSSES DURING THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR: WHAT REALLY FORCED PHILIP THE GOOD FROM THE WAR? Kelly DeVries
I first became concerned with war financing when I took Dr. John Munro’s seminar at the University of Toronto twenty years ago. His lengthy bibliography and the seminar discussion opened my mind to ways of looking at medieval warfare which I have profited from ever since. This was followed by one of my first medieval historical “reality checks,” when in approaching John with a project concerning a data base of some 4,400 Burgundian gunpowder weapons dating from 1410 to 1477, many listed with costs, and planning to make a comparative study of these costs, the reality of Burgundian monetarism was pointed out to me. The fluctuation of such currency over this period, especially as it was not currency but currencies that these records report, made such a study nearly impossible, I was told. From that conversation, too, I profited, and I am sure that it will come as a relief to John that when, finally, my study of Burgundian gunpowder weapons, co-written by Robert D. Smith of the Royal Armouries, was published in 2005, it also lacked any comparative cost analysis of the gunpowder weapons of the four Valois dukes of Burgundy.1 Nevertheless, I have still remained interested in the financing of warfare, and especially how such affected and effected military policy, strategy, and tactics. This should be a matter of immense importance, yet I am ashamed to admit that military historians have not paid enough attention to economic matters. In my Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, which comes in at 1045 pages, only three of those pages are devoted to war financing in general with an additional four pages devoted specifically to
1 Robert D. Smith and Kelly DeVries, The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy, 1363-1477 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005), in which some of the following is discussed and elaborated on.
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financing in the Hundred Years War.2 Perhaps for the earlier Middle Ages this is excusable; there are no extant records that can be used to study the financing of William the Conqueror’s conquest of England. Indeed, I found that even trying to determine the financing behind the Flemish rebellion of 1302-1305, the project I eventually attempted for John’s course, was nearly impossible—Bruges paid for the majority of it, with Ypres and Courtrai in for a chunk, anything more detailed was undetectable.3 But for the later Middle Ages, and especially the Hundred Years War, it seems that we should know more about the military financing. It was fought for a long period of time, over the reign of several kings and magnates; there were several lands involved; extant records are more numerous; and military actions, winners and losers, are more clearly identified, as are the causes of these victories and defeats. Still, this has made little impact on the scholarship. Of the prominent general studies of the war in any language, none, save Christopher Allmand’s The Hundred Years War, have the slightest discussion on the financing of the conflict, from either the English or French side, let alone from any of the other lands involved: Scotland, Burgundy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and the various Low Countries entities. Allmand’s book does consider the subject, in eight pages, although he discusses only “Taxation and Fiscal Institutions” and hides it in the middle of his section on “The Institutions of War.” Furthermore, most of his examples in this chapter come not from any king ruling during the war, but from the reign of Philip the Fair, and not a single word is devoted to the financing of the fifteenth-century warfare.4 Sometimes, this neglect can become quite 2
Kelly DeVries, A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 262-5, 398-402; an update, published in 2005, A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology Update 2004 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), adds only six more references (46, 73, 204). 3 Although several new studies of this conflict appeared in 2002, with the seven hundred year anniversary of the battle of Courtrai (see Cumulative Bibliography Update, 232-4), none of these discussed the financing of the rebellion. In this author’s opinion, the most complete studies of the 1302-1305 rebellion remain J. F. Verbruggen’s De slag der guldensporen: Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van Vlaanderens vrijheidsoorlog, 1297-1305 (Antwerp: N. V. Standaard Boekhandel, 1952)—now translated as The Battle of the Golden Spurs: Courtrai, 11 July 1302, ed. Kelly DeVries, trans. David Richard Ferguson (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2002)—and Vlaanderen naar de Guldensporenslag (Bruges: Westvlaamse Gidsenkring, 1991). 4 Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War
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absurd. In the last thirteen years two major studies on the first decade of the war have been published, Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years War: Trial by Battle, and Clifford Rogers’ War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327-1360, with both determining the cause of Edward III’s failure at the siege of Tournai as the unwillingness of his Parliament to pay for the sustained siege, despite the town being on the verge of defeat.5 Yet, neither details what forms of financing there were, why such financing was solely in the hands of Parliament, why Edward had not arranged his financing more completely before he left England, why England was paying for the siege alone when Flemish, Brabantese, Hainaulter, and German allied forces were also involved, probably in greater numbers than the English, and, finally, why if his war financing was such a hardship in 1340, it was well in hand by 1341 when Edward was prepared to make yet another assault on the continent.6 (As one might guess from my criticism, my own study of the failure of the siege of Tournai has determined a different cause, the breaking apart of the southern Low Countries and German alliance, with the
c. 1300-c. 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 102-11. Syntheses on the Hundred Years War that exclude any discussion on financing include Joseph Calmette and Eugène Déprez, Histoire du Moyen Age, vol. 7, part 1, La France et l’Angleterre en conflit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1937); Edouard Perroy, The Hundred Years War, trans. W. B. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); Alfred H. Burne, The Crecy War: A Military History of the Hundred Years War from 1337 to the Peace of Bretigny, 1360 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1955); Alfred H. Burne, The Agincourt War: A Military History of the Latter Part of the Hundred Years War from 1369 to 1453 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1956); André Leguai, La guerre de cent ans (Paris: Editions Fernand Nathan, 1974); Philippe Contamine, La guerre de cent ans, 3rd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977); Desmond Seward, The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337-1453 (New York: Atheneum, 1978); Jean Favier, La guerre de cent ans (Paris: Fayard, 1980); Robin Neillands, The Hundred Years War (London: Routledge, 1990); and Anne Curry, The Hundred Years War, 2nd ed. (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 5 Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War: Trial by Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 338-70, and Clifford J. Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327-1360 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000), 199-216. 6 On the desire to return to combat by the end of 1341 see Michael Prestwich, “English Armies in the Early Stages of the Hundred Years War: A Scheme in 1341,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 56 (1983): 102-13.
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defection of the Brabantese).7 I could go on. Suffice it to say, that most scholars who have written about the English side have been interested in the subject of Hundred Year War financing as a “big picture,” considering the war as a whole, the McFarlanes and Postans, with few considering smaller instances of war financing and their effects on the fighting of the war.8 About France the opposite has been the case: there more studies have appeared considering smaller examples of war financing and their limited effects, either chronological or geographical.9 Only Philippe Contamine has attempted to take a larger look at the “cost” of the Hundred Years War, and his “approaches,” as he calls them, so far have been more theoretical than substantive.10 Interestingly, scholars discussing the Hundred Years War from the Burgundian or Low Countries’ perspective have done a far better job of investigating the profits and losses of the Hundred Years War. Although most of these studies have been focused on smaller situations, there are so many of them that I was recently able to combine several together to present a larger perspective on how the economic costs seem not to have mattered in determining the number of rebellions of the Southern Low Countries’ towns during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This brings me back to Dr. Munro. None of the studies mentioned above have suggested any determination of military strategy or tactics, except for an article by John Munro, “An Economic Aspect of the Collapse of the AngloBurgundian Alliance, 1428-1442,” which appeared in the English Historical Review in 1970 and which was extended later in his book, 7 Kelly DeVries, “Contemporary Views of Edward III's Failure at the Siege of Tournai, 1340,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 39 (1995): 70-105. 8 K. B. McFarlane, “War, the Economy and Social Change: England and the Hundred Years War,” in England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays (London: Hambledon, 1981), 139-50, and M. M. Postan, “The Costs of the Hundred Years War,” Past and Present 27 (1964): 34-53. 9 See, among others, Harry A. Miskimin, Money and Power in FifteenthCentury France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); and John Bell Henneman, Royal Taxation in Fourteenth Century France: The Development of War Financing, 1322-1356 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) and Royal Taxation in Fourteenth-Century France: The Captivity and Ransom of John II, 13561370 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1976). 10 Philippe Contamine, “La guerre de cent ans en France: une approche économique,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 47 (1974): 125-49. See also Contamine’s Guerre, état et société à la fin du moyen âge: Études sur les armées des rois de France, 1337-1494 (Paris: Mouton, 1972).
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Wool, Cloth, and Gold: The Struggle for Bullion in Anglo-Burgundian Trade, 1340-1478, published two years later. Now, I will not attempt to summarize Munro’s article or book, I only wish to say that he suggests that economics had something to do with the break-up of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance in 1435, the agreed upon “turning point” of the Hundred Years War. I agree with John. But I want to take it a step further, and also look at the issue a bit deeper, meaning that Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy does not simply abandon his English allies in 1435, a process which I see beginning with his failure at the siege of Compiègne in 1430, that first creates a negative economic divide between Burgundy and England, but, after his failure at the siege of Calais in 1436, which increases his war financing problems, he also abandons the French, to turn his military focus towards the Low Countries and the economic problems he has created for himself there by his Hundred Year War decisions in 1430-1436. It was Philip’s abandonment of the English that meant they would never win the war, but that it was his abandonment of the French that meant the war would not be over quickly; instead it would last until 1453.11 First, to the two failed Burgundian sieges and their financing problems. Almost anyone who knows even the most meager history of the Hundred Years War will know that 1430 was not the best year for the English. The previous year a young peasant woman, ironically born and raised in Burgundian territory, appeared saying that she had received a mission from God to free occupied France from its English occupiers. To the Burgundians, Joan of Arc posed little problem. But to the English, she was a military disaster, the like of which they had never seen before nor, one might add, after. Joan of Arc menaced them. Less than a week after she had arrived at Orléans, she had relieved the English siege of that town, an incredibly difficult task considering that they were in control of the fortified bridgehead across the Loire, the Tourelles. A month later, she removed the remaining English forces from their Loire strongholds—at Jargeau, Meung-sur-Loire, and Beaugency—and had won
11
While this article focuses on the economic woes created by Philip’s failures in these sieges, I discuss the military situation created in the forthcoming “The Effect on the Hundred Years War of Philip the Good’s Failures at Compiègne (1430) and Calais (1436).”
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the battle of Patay. Then, shortly after, she led an army to Reims, capturing towns along the way, where Charles the Dauphin was crowned King Charles VII of France.12 All during this time, Joan and, after his coronation, Charles VII, made entreaties for peace towards the Burgundians.13 What Joan of Arc and Charles VII did not offer Philip the Good, however, the English leader in France, John, duke of Bedford, did: money. By the end of 1429, Bedford was desperate for Burgundian assistance. The reverses suffered by the English at the hands of Joan of Arc in that year were more significant than any in the last fifty years. He needed to halt their progress before the English lost any more territory. So, Bedford needed Philip and, when the Burgundian duke demanded payment in return for services, the English leader was forced to ensure that the Burgundians would get it. And, indeed, Philip the Good did: by the end of 1431 he had been paid £150,000, although he was still owed £100,000.14 Obviously, money was a more important incentive to the Burgundian duke than Joan of Arc’s or Charles VII’s prospect of peace or French unity. With this settlement, the Anglo-Burgundian alliance was once again in force. A detailed and intricate military plan was agreed on, indicating how those lands currently held were to be apportioned and by whom governed, and what new military targets were to be undertaken.15 The Burgundian army then set out against its first objective, Compiègne. Compiègne, like several ungarrisoned French towns, had joined with Charles VII after he had been crowned. Yet, despite staying in the town for several days before Joan of Arc’s 12 On the military life and leadership of Joan of Arc see Kelly DeVries, Joan of Arc: A Military Leader (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999). 13 One extant letter is preserved in the Archives du Nord in Lille. It is edited in Jules Quicherat, ed., Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc dite la Pucelle, 5 vols. (Paris: Jules Renouard et Cie., 1841-1849), 5: 1267, and Régine Pernoud and Marie-Véronique Clin, Joan of Arc: Her Story, trans. and rev. J. D. Adams (New York, 1998), 253-4. I have used the translation found in Pernoud and Clin, Joan of Arc, 67-8. See also DeVries, Joan of Arc, 139. 14 Richard Vaughan, Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy (London: Longmans, 1970), 17. 15 This plan is in the Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fr. 1278, fols. 12-14. It is edited in part in Pierre Champion, Guillaume de Flavy: Captaine de Compiègne: Contribution à l’histoire de Jeanne d’Arc et à l’étude de la vie militaire et privée au XVe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1906), no. 30, and translated in part in Vaughan, Philip the Good, 22-4.
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attack on Paris, Charles retreated to his Loire River holdings following her failure to take Paris, abandoning Compiègne and the other towns in the region which had joined him.16 Philip the Good may have thought that as Compiègne had gone over so easily to Charles, it might just as easily leave him, especially as he had, it seems, so quickly abandoned the town. However, Compiègne was not going to abandon the French king. The people of the town received news in March 1430 that Philip was planning to lay siege to Compiègne and decided that they would not surrender to him. They chose to remain French even though that meant that they would have to resist attempts to capture their town. The citizens of Compiègne began to stockpile supplies and weapons. Such bravery inspired Joan of Arc who felt that she had been held back from military engagements since the beginning of the year. Eventually she joined the townspeople in the defense of their town, arriving there before the Burgundians.17 Philip had amassed a large army and an impressive artillery train.18 At this date, there was perhaps no power with a stronger or more numerous gunpowder weaponry arsenal than the Burgundians, and almost all of it was directed at Compiègne. Contemporary chroniclers report the existence of at least five large bombards, two veuglaires, one large and one small, innumerable couloverines, and two “engins” among the besieging Burgundian army;19 other sources record the transportation of at least 17,000 lbs. of gunpowder with the artillery train.20 Extant artillery comptes for the Burgundian forces 16
DeVries, Joan of Arc, 153-4. DeVries, Joan of Arc, 166-70. 18 This is discussed more completely in Smith and DeVries, The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy. 19 Jehan de Waurin, Récueil des croniques et anchiennes istories de la Grant Bretaigne, ed. W. and E. L. C. P. Hardy, 5 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office; rpt. Wiesbaden: Kraus Reprint Ltd., 1864-91), 3: 362; Enguerran Monstrelet, Chronique, ed. L. Douet-d'Arcq, 6 vols. (Paris: Mme. J. Renouard, 1857-1862), 4: 418-9; Georges Chastellain, Œuvres, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 8 vols. (Brussels: F. Heussner, 1863-66), 2: 53; and Antonio Morosini, Chronique: Extraits relatifs à l’histoire de France, trans. and ed. L. Dorez (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1898-1902), 3: 319-23. See also DeVries, Joan of Arc, 169-70, and Claude Gaier, L’industrie et le commerce des armes dans les anciennes principautés belges du XIIIème à la fin du XVème siècle (Paris: Société d’Edition “Les Belles Lettres”, 1973), 111. 20 Philippe Contamine, “La guerre de siège au temps de Jeanne d'Arc,” Dossiers d’archéologie 34 (May 1979): 16. 17
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have shown that these tallies are far too low. But this show of military technology did not intimidate either Joan of Arc or Guillaume de Flavy, the governor of Compiègne and leader of its defense effort. The fortifications of the town were very strong. Additionally, the defenders of Compiègne had their own gunpowder weaponry arsenal, and they had prepared their defenses to use it by destroying any superfluous fortifications which might hinder gunfire. These guns would prove very effective, particularly, as reported by an anonymous eyewitness, “the great number of small engines, called coulovrines, which were made of bronze and which fired lead balls.” He even boasted that these balls were able to penetrate the armor of a man-at-arms.21 This was not going to be a quick siege, but the Burgundian leaders, especially Jean of Luxembourg, felt that they could still achieve a victory, even against such a fortified location and even against Joan of Arc. The actual defeat of Joan was accomplished quite easily. Not accustomed to stand behind walls in a defensive posture, on 23 May 1430, with a small group of soldiers, she decided to ride out of the town and strike into the Burgundian army. What she hoped to accomplish with this misguided tactic, no one has adequately explained, for it was unsuccessful and she was captured.22 Her capture proved to be worth 10,000 livres tournois to Jean of Luxembourg, whose men had captured her, the sum the English paid for her ransom. A little more than a year after she had been captured, on 30 May 1431, Joan of Arc was burned to death as a heretic in the market-place of Rouen.23 However, the capture of Compiègne was quite another matter. In fact, it never did occur. Despite the large number of gunpowder weapons which Philip the Good had at the siege, and the constant bombardment against the town, its walls, gates, and inhabitants, the town did not capitulate. All contemporary narrative sources record that the Burgundian guns were very powerful and very destructive. Enguerran Monstrelet describes a siege where the Burgundians built a large bastille or boulevard of earth, a bow-shot from the town, in which they set up their gunpowder weapons. These were aimed
21
Quoted in Champion, Guillaume de Flavy, 49 n.10. Joan of Arc gave the best account of this at her trial (in Quicherat, Procès de condamnation, 1: 207-8). See also DeVries, Joan of Arc, 176. 23 DeVries, Joan of Arc, 176-82. 22
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against Compiègne “which, because of the continuation of large stones which they fired, disrupted and breached the gates, bridge, mills, and boulevard of the town in many places.” The mills ceased to mill; and one gunshot even killed Louis de Flavy, the brother of the governor, Guillaume. Mines also were attempted and failed.24 Still, Guillaume de Flavy continued to defend diligently the walls and the boulevard. According to both Le livre des trahisons de France envers la maison de Bourgogne and Jean de Waurin, the gunpowder weapons of the townspeople seemed to have been as effective as those of the Burgundians, with “one cannon mounted on the wall” killing ten or twelve besiegers.25 Throughout the summer the siege of Compiègne went on. The joy of capturing Joan of Arc was soon forgotten, and the plodding of the constant conflict must have worn on the soldiers. Surprisingly, little fatigue seems to have afflicted the besieged; who seem to have been well provided for, despite being encircled by hostile forces. No contemporary source even mentions hunger being a problem inside the town, thus missing a narrative topos so prevalent in accounts of other Hundred Year War sieges. On the other hand, the besiegers were both fatigued and tormented by their inability to conquer the site. Suddenly, and really without an adequate explanation in any of the original sources, the Burgundians abandoned the siege. In fact they abandoned it so quickly that they left behind their numerous gunpowder artillery pieces which the inhabitants of Compiègne quickly captured and brought within the gates. What actually happened is truly one of the biggest mysteries of the Hundred Years War. Monstrelet claims that it was a decision made by Jean of Luxembourg, the Burgundian general at the siege, the count of Hontiton, and “many other notables in their company.” But, if this was the case, why did they leave with such speed that they abandoned “a very large number of large bombards, cannons, veuglaires, serpentines, coulovrines, and other artillery which were left in the hands of the French, their adversaries?” Monstrelet ends his account:
24
Monstrelet, Chronique, 4: 390-91. See also Waurin, Récueil, 3: 361-3, 3859; Chastellain, Œuvres, 2: 53, and Morosini, Chronique, 3: 319-23. 25 Le livre des trahisons de France envers la maison de Bourgogne, in Chroniques relatives à l'histoire de la Belgique sous la domination des ducs de Bourgogne (texts français), ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels: M. Hayez, 1873), 176. See also Waurin, Récueil, 3: 388-9.
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“This artillery was the duke of Burgundy’s!”26 Jean de Waurin is equally confused and offers the same surprise at the abandoning of “a large quantity of large bombards, cannons, veuglaires, serpentines, and other artillery which fell into the hands of the enemy.” The author of Le livre des trahisons de France envers la maison de Bourgogne professes that it was the defensive gunfire which “convinced them to retreat.”27 Still, this can hardly be the sole or even the primary reason for such a quick withdrawal. Modern authors are equally befuddled at the Burgundian retreat. Richard Vaughan suggests only that the Burgundians “were forced” to leave;28 Pierre Champion praises the inhabitants of Compiègne and especially their governor and military leader, Guillaume de Flavy, whose reputation he was trying to rehabilitate from one who “gave up” Joan of Arc;29 surprisingly, many do not even record the siege, except for its relationship to the soon-to-be martyred Saint Joan;30 and none mention the Burgundian financing problems that resulted from the defeat. Yet, the failure of the Burgundians to capture Compiègne, with its attendant loss of gunpowder artillery, was of enormous importance both to the next phase of the Hundred Years War and, especially, to the relationship between the Burgundians and the English, at whose behest the duke of Burgundy was undertaking the siege. Although Monstrelet reports that Jean of Luxembourg was condemned for his actions by Philip the Good,31 the duke himself felt that blame for the military debacle should be laid firmly at the feet of the English. In a letter written 4 November 1430 by Philip to Henry VI, he clearly makes this known: Most redoubted lord, I recommend myself to you in all humility. I imagine that you and your councillors remember that it was at your urgent request that I took part in your French war. For my part, I
26
Monstrelet, Chronique, 4: 418-9. Le livre des trahisons de France envers la maison de Bourgogne, 176. 28 Vaughan, Philip the Good, 24. 29 Champion, Guillaume de Flavy, 42-58, 162-82. 30 See, for example, Burne, The Agincourt War; Sir Charles W.C. Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, vol. 2 (London: Methuen, 1924; rpt. London: Greenhill Books, 1998); and Ferdinand Lot, L’art militaire et les armées au moyen-âge en Europe et dans le proche orient (Paris: Payot, 1946). 31 Monstrelet, Chronique, 4: 419. 27
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have so far accomplished everything that I agreed to and promised in the indenture made between ... the cardinal of England [Henry Beaufort], acting in your name, and myself. It is a fact that, as a result, all my lands both in Burgundy and Picardy have been and are at war and in danger of destruction ... Moreover, it was at your request and command that I undertook the siege of Compiègne, though this was contrary to the advice of my council and my own opinion. For it had seemed to us better for me to advance towards Creil and Laon, as appears in the recommendations drawn up on this and sent to Calais by our secretary Master Jehan Milet. It is also true, most redoubted lord, that, according to the agreement drawn up on your part with my people, you ought to have paid me the sum of 19,500 francs of royal money each month for the expenses of my troops before Compiègne, as well as the cost of the artillery; while my good cousin the earl of Huntingdon with his company ought to have remained with me before the said town of Compiègne ...32 It was under the impression that this would be done on your part, and especially that the said payment would be made without fail, as agreed, that I had my men stationed before Compiègne all the time. But, most redoubted lord, these payments have not been kept up by you, for they are in arrears to the tune of two months. The same goes for the artillery, for which I myself paid out over 40,000 saluts... Likewise, my good cousin of Huntingdon has been unable, according to him, for want of payment, to keep his forces in the field any longer ... My redoubted lord, I cannot continue these [military operations] without adequate provision in future from you ... and without payment of what is due to me, both on account of the two months abovementioned, and for the artillery. Thus most redoubted lord, I ask and entreat you most humbly to see that the said sums are paid over at once to my people at Calais who have been waiting there for this purpose for some time ...33
32
This was the sum agreed to by the duke of Bedford before the siege. This letter is edited in Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France during the Reign of Henry VI, ed. J. Stevenson, 2 vols. in 3 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office; reprint Wiesbaden: Kraus Reprint Ltd., 1965), 2.1: 156-64. The partial translation I am using comes from Vaughan, Philip the Good, 24-5. 33
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The Anglo-Burgundian relationship, perhaps never an entirely solid one during the reign of Philip the Good, was irreparably damaged at Compiègne for a lack of promised financing. By the way, although it appears that some of the promised funds were eventually paid, the costs of the artillery lost to the French, for which Philip asked to be recompensed, never was paid. Let me jump to 1436 and the siege of Calais. There is of course much history in between the failed siege at Compiègne and that at Calais, including, most importantly, the Congress of Arras, where Philip the Good led the Burgundians away from the alliance they had had since before the assassination of Philip’s father, John the Fearless, in 1419. I do not have the time to go into this in depth, except to suggest that it was not so much a Burgundian treason against the French, as Joyceline Gledhill Dickinson and others have suggested, as it was an attempt by the duke to bring the two sides together and their obstinacy which caused his reversal of previous policy.34 In 1436, Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy proved beyond any doubt that the Anglo-Burgundian alliance was at an end when he directed his largest army and artillery train yet assembled to attack Calais. This important coastal town had since 1347 been securely held in the hands of the English. Its symbolism may even have outweighed its strategic significance. Had Philip successfully besieged Calais, following so closely on the heels of their diplomatic defeat at the Congress of Arras, the English would surely have changed their strategic plans for the future of the Hundred Years War. Instead, the siege of Calais was a resounding defeat for the Burgundians. Philip began to formalize his plan in January 1436. Because of logistical problems, whenever a leader needed to gather a large number of gunpowder artillery pieces, as the siege of Calais re34
I think that Joyceline Gledhill Dickinson (The Congress of Arras, 1435: A Study in Medieval Diplomacy [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955]) does an excellent job of examining the Congress of Arras from the Anglo-French perspectives, with some correcting by the various essayists in Denis Clauzel, Charles GiryDeloison, and Christophe Leduc, ed., Arras et la diplomatie européenne, XVe-XVIe siècles (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 1999). But neither she nor those in the latter work analyze the Congress from Philip’s position. Nor, in my view, does Vaughan, Philip the Good, 98-107. I have attempted to do this briefly in my and Bob Smith’s The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy, and plan to return later to it.
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quired, a longer planning time was necessary. In this case the Burgundians had no central artillery arsenal, and thus had to amass his gunpowder weapons from smaller, local armories. Most of the guns used at the siege of Calais were supplied from the Low Countries, especially from the counties of Flanders, Holland, Picardy, and Artois. There were also four hundred ships, not including additional smaller vessels, “stuffed with the most strong ordnance and all other materiel of war that any man had ever heard of,” which sailed from the harbors of Sluys, Biervliet, and Rotterdam.35 One convoy from Holland included a large veuglaire with eight removable chambers, two crapadeaux with six chambers, one hundred bronze coulovrines, and bombard gunstones weighing between 180 and 350 livres, not to mention a large number of lances and crossbows.36 Notarial documents at the Archives de la Côte-d'Or record the following numbers and types of Burgundian gunpowder weapons at the siege of Calais: 3 2 3 2 2
Iron Gros Bombards and 3 other Gros Bombards from Holland Iron Bombards from Picardy Bronze Bombards from Burgundy Iron and 1 other Bombard from Abbeville Bronze Bombards, named Pruce and Bergiere, and 1 Iron Bombard from the Saint-Bertin Monastery in Saint-Omer (indicated in other documents to have been brought there as a central site) 1 Bronze Bombard chamber for the Bourgoinge from the Saint-Bertin Monastery 7 Gros Veuglaires taken from naval vessels 4 Iron and 1 other Gros Veuglaires from Saint-Bertin Monastery 2 Iron and 3 other Gros Veuglaires (no site mentioned) 2 Gros Veuglaires from Gravelines 1 Gros Veuglaire from Damp 17 Iron and 13 other Veuglaires from Sluys 23 Veuglaires from Bruges or Sluys 11 Veuglaires from Holland
35 This quote comes from a document written by an English spy (Archives départementales du Nord, B10401, fol. 29) with a complete transcription in Vaughan, Philip the Good, 75-80. 36 Monique Sommé, “L'armée Bourguignonne au siège de Calais de 1436,” in Guerre et société en France, en Angleterre et en Bourgogne XIVe-XVe siècle, ed. P. Contamine et al. (Lille: Centre d'histoire de la région du Nord et de l'Europe du Nord-Ouest, Université Charles de Gaulle Lille III, 1991), 203.
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14 Iron and 9 other Veuglaires (no site mentioned) 6 Iron Veuglaires from naval vessels 1 Veuglaire, named Anvers, and 2 other Veuglaires from Abbeville 2 Iron Veuglaires from Avennes 2 Veuglaires from Bruges 23 Petit Veuglaires (no site mentioned) 2 Petit Veuglaires from Abbeville 4 Veuglaire Chambers from Sluys 23 Cannons or Veuglaires from Sluys 2 Petit Cannons from Abbeville 12 Iron Crapaudeaux (site not mentioned) 5 Iron Crapaudeaux from Gravelines 3 Iron Crapaudeaux from Abbeville 2 Petit Crapaudeaux (site not mentioned) 48 (or 52) Gros Coulovrines 200 Bronze Coulovrines 40 Iron Coulovrines 3 Other Coulovrines 2 Bronze Coulovrines a escappe37
It is also recorded that Burgundian and Low Countries’ carpenters made carts, wagons, and mantlets for the large- and medium-sized gunpowder weapons; masons carved stone cannonballs; and cannoneers purchased saltpeter and made gunpowder.38 The expense was enormous. The size and presence at Calais of this incredibly large gunpowder artillery train is commented on by all of the chroniclers who discuss the siege. As a whole they are impressed with what the duke of Burgundy was able to deliver to the walls of the English town. Enguerran de Monstrelet describes the “large number of ribauds carrying canons and other large engins” to the siege.39 Jean de Waurin writes that the Philip the Good had “a large number of bombards, cannons, ribaudequins, and large serpentines.”40 And Jean 37 See the documents preserved in Joseph Garnier, L’artillerie des ducs de Bourgogne d’après les documents conservés aux archives de la Côte-d’Or (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1895), 151-63. 38 Sommé, “L'armée Bourguignonne,” 203. 39 Monstrelet, Chronique, 5: 240. See also Oliver van Dixmude, Merkwaerdige gebeurtenissen vooral in Vlaenderen en Brabant van 1377 tot 1443, ed. J. J. Lambin (Ypres: Lambin en Zoon, 1835), 150. 40 Waurin, Récueil, 4: 160. See also Le livre des trahisons de France envers la maison de Bourgogne, 211, and Liber de virtutibus sui genitoris Philippi Burgundiae
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Chartier notes that one of the Burgundian bombards was so large that it required 50 horses to pull it, another 36 horses, and others 26 horses each, not including the large number of other various sized guns which accompanied those larger weapons.41 This artillery force was so large, it seems, that to utilize their numerous gunpowder weapons, the Burgundian army not only placed them at weak spots around the walls, but also constructed their own earth-andwood artillery fortifications, boulevards and artillery towers around Calais and filled them with guns. The result of all of these gunpowder weapons at the siege of Calais, that began in earnest on 9 July 1436, was an intense bombardment of the town. Day and night cannonballs fell on the walls and flew over them to land on the buildings inside. The most cinematic portrayal of this comes from a Middle English poem written at the time of the siege. First, the anonymous author of this poem describes the weapons which the duke had brought to Calais: With gonnes grete and ordinance, That theyme myght helpe and avance, With many a proude pavis; Gailly paynted and stuffed wele, Ribawdes, armed with Iren and stele, Was neuer better devyse.
Then the cannoneers began to attack the town: Gonners began to shew thair art, Into the tovn in many apart, Shot many a full grete ston.
But, fortunately, the townspeople were preserved from the terror that these weapons delivered, preserved by God, Mary, and, interestingly, the patron saint of cannoneers, Saint Barbara: Thanked be god, and marie mylde, They hurt neither man, woman, ne childe. ducis, in Chroniques relatives à l'histoire de la Belgique sous la domination des ducs de Bourgogne (texts latins), ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels: M. Hayez, 1876), 62-3. 41 Jean Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, roi de France, ed. Vallet de Viriville, 3 vols. (Paris: P. Jannet, 1858), 1: 242.
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Houses thogh they did harme; “Seynt Barbara!” than was the crie, Whan stones in the tovn flye, They cowde noon other charme.42
Yet, these Burgundian gunpowder weapons, despite their power and numbers, were not successful in breaching the walls or causing the town’s capitulation. For fifteen days they fired on the town, but without success. This might be credited to the defensive gunpowder weapons which were inside the town which, at least according to the English chronicle, The Brut, were very effective in the defense of the town, with one Calaisien gunshot even piercing Philip the Good’s tent.43 However, most contemporary chroniclers give no credit to the town’s defensive weapons in relieving the siege. Indeed, they note that neither the offensive nor defensive gunfire was effective. While the Burgundian forces were easily able to conquer smaller nearby fortifications, such as Oye, Marck, and Balinghem, by placing their guns near the walls and battering them down, when it came to the larger and better defended walls of Calais, they were incapable of breaching them, even if, as Monstrelet claims, these gunpowder weapons “strongly damaged” the walls of the town.44 On the other hand, how effective can a bombardment lasting only fifteen days be? The military history of the fifteenth century showed 42 The version of this poem used is Ralph A. Klinefelter, ed., “‘The Siege of Calais’: A New Text,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 67 (1952): 888-95. The quotes which appear in the text above are found on pp. 891-3. Three more poems can be found in Rossell Hope Robbins, ed., Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York, 1959), 78-89; they originated in The Brut, or the Chronicles of England, ed. F. W. D. Brie (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1906-1908). However, Roger Nicholson, of the Department of English, University of Auckland, New Zealand, who has worked on these poems, assures me that there are at least two more such poems as yet unedited, one in London, Lambeth Palace Library, ms. 6, and a second in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby ms. 102. All were written within a few months of the end of the siege. 43 The Brut, 2: 578. Monstrelet (Chronique, 5: 245) confirms this, adding that while the cannonball did not kill the duke, it did kill a trumpeter and three knights who were with him. See also Olivier van Dixmude, Merkwaerdige, 1545. 44 Monstrelet, Chronique, 5: 243, 245. See also Waurin, Récueil, 4: 175; The Brut, 2: 577-9; the Liber de virtutibus sui genitoris Philippi Burgundiae ducis, 63; and Vaughan, Philip the Good, 79. The fortifications of the nearby castle of Guines also held out during the siege.
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that, if the inhabitants desired to withstand a siege, strong fortifications generally took a very long time to be defeated, even when faced with the constant bombardment of gunpowder weapons. Indeed, it seems that only when there was no desire to withstand a siege was there a quick capitulation, such as those gained by Henry V in Normandy and Joan of Arc along the coronation route to Rheims. At all other times sieges either failed or dragged out until fatigue or privation on one side or the other brought about victory or defeat.45 Yet, on some occasions, and ever more frequently during the mid-fifteenth century, military leaders simply gave up when their combatants and artillery were unable to bring about a victory either from intimidation at the sight of the large number of gunpowder weapons facing a site or the increased fear of destruction after a few days of gunpowder weaponry bombardment. Such can only be the reason for Charles VII’s unwillingness to pursue the attack of Paris after only one day in 142946 and perhaps may also be the reason why Philip the Good raised his siege of Calais after little more than two weeks in 1436. Richard Vaughan raises other possibilities. He cites the failure of the Burgundian fleet, raised largely among Flemish and Dutch coastal towns, to arrive at Calais at the same time as the army, appearing only after fatigue and discouragement had begun to inflict their toll on the besieging troops. Before they arrived, English ships had sailed in and out of Calais, and there was no evidence of distress among the besieged inhabitants. Once the Burgundian fleet arrived, it did little to change the situation, proving as Edward III had discovered in 1346-1347 when he conquered the town, that it was extremely difficult for a blockade of any size to cut off all relieving maritime traffic to the stricken inhabitants.47 In the meantime, rivalry between two of the larger factions of Flemish troops, the Brugeois and Ghentenaars, had begun to affect the morale of the Burgundian troops. Unwittingly, the Calaisiens 45 I investigate this more in “‘The Walls Come Tumbling Down’: The Myth of Fortification Vulnerability to Early Gunpowder Weapons,” in The Hundred Years War, ed. L. J. Andrew Villalon and Donald Kagay (Leiden: Brill, 2005). 46 See DeVries, Joan of Arc, 152-4. 47 Vaughan, Philip the Good, 79. On the problems of Edward III’s siege in 1346-1347 see Kelly DeVries, “Hunger, Flemish Participation and the Flight of Philip VI: Contemporary Accounts of the Siege of Calais, 1346-47,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History n.s. 12 (1991): 129-81.
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played on this rivalry. On 26 July, the day after the Burgundian ships’ arrival at Calais, they made a sortie from the Boulogne gate, surprising a unit of Brugeois troops, that at the time also included Philip the Good. This defeat was met by jeers and mockery from the Ghentenaars. On 28 July, another group of English inhabitants of the town attacked a wooden artillery tower manned by Ghentenaar troops, again by surprise. It was now the Brugeois soldiers’ turn to respond with their own derision. The Ghentenaars had reached their breaking point, and as fear and rumors of other attacks spread throughout their camp, they fled during the night. The next morning, the Brugeois joined them. The rest of the Burgundian army soon followed suit.48 The defeat was made even more serious by the abandonment of many of the Burgundian gunpowder weapons to hasten the retreat. The Brut indicates that the Brugeois tried to bury some of their guns in the sand in an effort to keep them from falling into English hands, but most seem simply to have been left behind.49 Whether the Flemings were to be blamed entirely for this military debacle is debatable. Certainly the English felt so, with poems such as “The Englishman’s Mocking Song Against the Flemings” and “An English Ballad Against the Flemings” becoming so prevalent that they found their way into accounts of The Brut.50 In these there is little doubt that the Flemings were to blame for the defeat: Remembres now, ye Flemmynges, vpon youre owne shame; When ye laide seege to Caleis, ye wer right still to blame; For more of reputacioun, ben Englisshmen þen ye, And comen of more gentill blode, of olde antiquitie; For Flemmynges come of Flemmed men ye shal wel vndirstand, For fflemed men & banshid men enhabit first youre land. (“The Englishman’s Mocking Song Against the Flemings”)51 Vndyr a veyle of fals decepcioun, Record of Flaundrys, whiche falsly dothe malygne. 48
Vaughan, Philip the Good, 79-80. See also Waurin, Récueil, 4: 186. The Brut, 2: 581, 583. See also Vaughan, Philip the Good, 80. Jean de Waurin (Récueil, 4: 188-9) claims that the Flemings did take their best gunpowder weapons with them. 50 The Brut, 2: 582-4, 600-1. 51 The Brut, 2: 583-4. 49
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us in one place, and the men of Bruges, Ypres, the Franc of Bruges their followers and some of our nobles in another place ... . Because the spot where we and our people of Ghent were lodged was unsuitable for fighting a pitched battle when the enemy came, we asked them to withdraw with us and the noblemen in our company to a certain place quite near their encampment ... which was said to be the best, most suitable and most advantageous position to await the enemy in battle order, and they agreed to do this ... Nevertheless, on Saturday 28 July late at night, these people of Ghent, considering neither our honour nor their own, regardless of the promises which they had that very day renewed, and at a time when we were expecting the enemy to arrive on the following Monday or Tuesday, came to tell us that they had decided to decamp that night and to withdraw to a place near the town of Gravelines in Flanders, which is three leagues from Calais. There, they would await events, having put the river [Aa] at Gravelines between themselves and the enemy. And at once, without listening to our requests or waiting for our advice, they departed that night, together with the men from the castellany of Ghent, and withdrew to the above-mentioned position near Gravelines. Moreover, not content with this, they persuaded the men of Bruges, Ypres, and the Franc of Bruges, who would willingly have stayed to carry out our wishes, to withdraw likewise. Since the contingent of noblemen we had with us was too small to do battle with the enemy ... we were forced to depart and withdraw to Gravelines with the Flemings, abandoning what we had begun with the utmost chagrin.55
But Philip’s councillor, Hugh de Lannoy, puts a more realistic spin on problems at Calais. In a letter to the duke written 10 September 1436, he blames the defeat at Calais on problems financing the siege, while at the same time prophesying of future financial problems brought about by the defeat, and placing those problems firmly in the Low Countries:
55
A translation of this letter is found in Vaughan, Philip the Good, 81-2. The original is edited in Marie-Rose Thielmans, ed., “Une lettre missive inédite de Philippe le Bon concernant le siège de Calais,” Bulletin de la commission royale d'histoire de Belgique 115 (1950): 285-96, although she mistakenly has Philip the Good sending the letter to his other brother-in-law, Arthur de Richemont.
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You must have appreciated, during the siege of Calais, what harm was done by the lack of finance, and it is to be feared that the war has only just begun. If you need to raise finance in Brabant, Holland, and other lands of yours, it can only be with the consent and good will of the people, especially when they see that you are at war [with England] and that the Flemings seem likely to revolt against you at any moment. If the truth be told, you have no territory whose populace is not hard pressed financially; nor are your domains, which are mortgaged, sold, or saddled with debts, able to help you. Again, you have seen how agitated your Flemish subjects are; some of them, indeed, are in armed rebellion. Strange and bitter things have been said about yourself, your government, and your leading councillors; and it is very like that, having got as far as talking in this way, they will soon go further than mere talk. Moreover, if you pacify them by kindness and by accepting their demands, other towns, which have similar aspirations, will rebel in the hopes of getting similar treatment. On the other hand, if you punish and repress them, it is to be feared that they will make disastrous alliances with your enemies. If by chance they start pillaging and robbing, it is possible that every wicked person will start plundering the rich. Covetousness exists among the well-off; you can imagine how much worse it is among the populace. In this matter, there is much anxiety. I note that, according to reports, the English are planning to keep a large number of ships at sea in order to effect a commercial blockade of your land of Flanders. This is a grave danger, for such harm would result if that country were deprived for any length of time of its cloth industry and commerce. And you appreciate how much it cost to send a fleet to sea to protect this commerce and resist the enemy. Moreover, if Holland and Zeeland continue their trade with the English, and they will probably want to do this, the Flemings, finding themselves without commerce, without their cloth industry, and involved in war on sea and land, will probably make an alliance with the English, your enemies, which could be very much to your prejudice and dishonor.56
56
The original of this text is found in Kervyn de Lettenhove, “Programme d’un gouvernement constitutionnel en Belgique au XVe siècle,” Bulletin de l’Académie Royale de Belgique 2nd ser., 14 (1862): 218-50. I have used the translation found in Wim Blockmans and Walter Prevenier, The Promised Lands: The Low Countries Under Burgundian Rule, 1369-1530, ed. Edward Peters, trans. Elizabeth Fackelman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 84.
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At the siege of Calais then, war financing can also be blamed for the failure, with the Flemish town rivalries perhaps at fault. The economic problems that directly followed the failed siege must also be considered. For one thing, immediately after the Burgundian withdrawal, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, who had succeeded to the leadership of the English troops in France after the death of his brother, John of Bedford, the previous year, and who had arrived to take command at Calais only to see the flight of the besiegers, led his own raid into western Flanders. Taking advantage of the Burgundian confusion, Gloucester burned several villages south of Dunkirk and around Ypres. The English fleet also raided along the Flemish coast as far north as the Zwin estuary and the island of Cadzand before both army and navy returned to Calais.57 This fulfilled in essence the last paragraph of Lannoy’s letter: the citizens of the southern Low Countries, and the Flemings in particular on this occasion, found themselves in the ironic position of defending their countryside and towns from the very people on whom their livelihood chiefly depended.58 Philip the Good and the Burgundian army would not be coming to their aid, as a number of letters from the ducal court to the Ghentenaars and others in Flanders insisting that the Flemings must defend themselves suggest.59 One would expect to see a similarity throughout Flanders during these troubled times, and, once again, the irony of it all is that these were the people with whom Flanders had been allied for more than two centuries, far longer than they had been in Burgundian control. It would not be long before the first paragraph of Lannoy’s letter would also be fulfilled: the larger towns of the southern Low Countries would seek their own means to ensure their economic wellbeing. They would rebel. Already by the end of 1436, led by their soldiers returning from Calais, the inhabitants of Bruges began an open rebellion against Philip the Good.60 It was the first of many 57
Vaughan, Philip the Good, 82-84. Examples of the cost of this defense appears in Kelly De Vries, “Provisions for the Ostend Militia on the Defense, August 1436,” Journal of Medieval Military History 3 (2005): 176-83. 59 See V. Fris, “Documents Gantois concernant la levée du siège de Calais en 1436,” in Mélanges Paul Frédéricq (Brussels: H. Lamertin, 1904), 245-58. 60 The military history of this siege can be found in Smith and DeVries, The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy. See also Jan Dumolyn, De Brugse opstand van 58
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Low Countries’ rebellions Philip the Good would be forced to face and put down. Although he allowed some generals aligned with him to fight on the side of the French, Philip the Good himself never returned to the Hundred Years War, nor did he allow the Burgundian army to be used en masse in any of Charles VII’s military conquest. Although he frequently drifted into Crusading fantasies and other imaginative and unfulfilled military adventures,61 from this time forward the duke’s focus was firmly placed on the southern Low Countries, geographically, and his treasury, financially. Never again would he rely on someone else to pay for an engagement, as he had with the English at Compiègne, or risk an enormous amount of expensive weapons on a single military endeavor, such as at Calais.
1436-1438 (Courtrai-Heule: U.G.A., 1997), Vaughan, Philip the Good, 86-92, and Blockmans and Prevenier, The Promised Lands, 98-99. 61 See Kelly DeVries, “The Failure of Philip the Good to Fulfill His Crusade Promise of 1454,” in The Medieval Crusade, ed. Susan Ridyard (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004), 157-70.
THE COST OF MAJESTY: FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROYAL COURT IN PORTUGAL AND ENGLAND AT THE TURN OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Susannah C. Humble Ferreira
The changes brought to bear in the royal courts of England and Portugal, at the turn of the sixteenth century, are strikingly similar. The households of both Henry VII (1485-1509) and Manuel I (14951521) underwent a sizeable increase in both human and spatial terms. Despite the constant fluctuation in population, attributable to location of the household and immediate political circumstances, it is evident that during these reigns, more people came to live as dependents of the king than ever before. It is true that household numbers had been on the rise in preceding reigns, and Rosemary Horrox has made a convincing argument that Richard III of England (1483-1485) appointed many of his retainers to positions within the royal household.1 Similarly, records from the reign of the Portuguese king João II point to an escalation in the number of residents at court receiving stipends or moradias.2 But the research of Sean Cunningham has shown that Henry VII doubled the number of dependants known as knights of the body as part of a strategy designed to increase his own political security.3 And the surviving records of Manuel I’s court indicate a similar trend occurring in Portugal.4 In order to accommodate these growing numbers, both Henry VII and Manuel I undertook a number of important building projects: the former king refurbishing and constructing large palaces along the River Thames, while the latter erected and expanded his 1
Rosemary Horrox, Richard III: A Study in Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 2 D. António Caetano de Sousa, Provas da história genealogica da Casa Real portuguesa (Coimbra: Atlântida, 1947), 3: 217-224. 3 Sean Cunningham, “The Establishment of the Tudor Regime: Henry VII, Rebellion and the Financial Control of the Aristocracy 1485-1509,” Ph.D. Diss., Lancaster University (1995). 4 Caetano de Sousa, Provas da história genealogica, 3: 440-476.
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domiciles in and around the important towns of Santarém, Évora and Lisbon.5 Such rapid expansion, in both England and Portugal, reveals a changing attitude toward the royal household and arguably marks a shift from a medieval household to a Renaissance-style court. No longer was presence at court restricted to essential personnel and a handful of grandes and no longer were household ordinances punctuated by legislation limiting their numbers. In Portugal, new ordinances in 1516 allowed lower ranking servants to maintain wives and families.6 And by the turn of the sixteenth century, the size of the royal households in both kingdoms began to outstrip the proscriptions that had limited their sizes in earlier centuries. From the medieval royal household, obsessed with economy, emerged the renaissance court devoted to appearances of opulence and majesty. Such was the transformation that historian Sir Geoffrey Elton could glibly claim: “the Tudor court as a centre of social and political life springs suddenly into existence with the accession of Henry VIII.”7 Of course, the royal courts did not, and could not, have materialized from thin air; transformation was attributable to major changes in the financial administration of both the royal households and the kingdoms. Research reflects that by securing a steady and reliable cash-flow into the coffers of the royal household, Henry VII and Manuel I were able to overcome substantial household debt and expand their royal courts. In revisiting the world of late medieval royal finance, a number of historians have cautioned against straightforward readings of exchequer and household accounts. Given the imperfect separation between personal and professional identity, the officers who handled the king’s money were individually responsible for sums in their possession. Thus as historian David Grummitt has noted, the oftcited accounts of the treasury of the chamber record only the sums 5 For a comparison of the money spent by Henry VII on palaces as compared to Edward IV, see H. M. Colvin, History of the King’s Works (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1963-1982), 2: 1024 and 4: 223. Also Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 19. Information on Manuel I’s expenditure on building works can be found in Anselmo Braamcamp Freire, ed., “Cartas de quitação del Rei D. Manuel,” Archivo Histórico Portuguez 1-7 (1903-1909). 6 British Library (BL) Add. 20958. 7 Geoffrey Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3: 40.
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of money that passed through the hands of the Treasurer, John Heron and do not reflect a complete picture of the money controlled by the department as a whole.8 This principle of private accountability is evident in the Portuguese quittance letters, or cartas das quitações that are made known to us through the royal chancery records. These quittances show that a crown official had to account for all money in his possession—sometimes even from beyond the grave—and officials and their families were held accountable for sums as if they had been held as a personal loan.9 Thus, in order to understand the operation of household administrative departments, it becomes necessary to consider the personal relationships of administrative officials, many of whom held more than one office. Since the publication of W. C. Richardson’s Tudor Chamber Administration in 1952, the attention given to the Treasury of the Chamber, as the kingdom’s primary financial department in the reign of Henry VII, has muddied our understanding of court finance.10 While the Treasury of the Chamber was undoubtedly the backbone of the financial machinery throughout much of the reign of Henry VII, it was not the primary financial department at court: that place belonged to the Treasury of the Household. A clue to the veritable relationship between these two departments can be seen in relation to the career of Sir Thomas Lovell. From 1485 until 1492, Lovell served as Treasurer of the Chamber, also occupying the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. But after the death of Sir Richard Croft in 1502, Lovell was given the position of Treasurer of the Household in what was ostensibly a promotion.11 The new office would have been more prestigious inasmuch as it gave Lovell an important position within the itinerant court, thereby offering him greater access to the king. But his new appointment also brought a closer social tie between the treasuries of the chamber and house-
8
David Grummitt, “Henry VII, Chamber Finance and the New Monarchy: Some New Evidence,” Historical Research 179 (1999): 229-243. 9 For example, the wife and heirs of Estevão Pestana, mantieiro of the royal household had to account for all the silver and goods that had been in his possession. Arquivos Nacionais/Torre do Tombo (AN/TT), Chancelarias de D. Manuel, liv. 29, fol. 118. 10 W. C. Richardson, Tudor Chamber Administration (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952). 11 S. B. Chrimes, Henry VII (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 126.
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hold insofar as the new Treasurer of the Chamber was John Heron, who had previously been serving as Lovell’s deputy. Presuming that the relationship of the two office-holders reflects the relationship of the two departments, it would appear that the treasury of the chamber was working to facilitate the expenditure of the treasury of the household. The traditional role of the treasury of the household, or counting house as it was sometimes called, was to regulate the expenditure of the royal household. Although the head of this department was nominally the Lord Steward, the official in charge of running all aspects of the household, the two main figures in its operation were the Treasurer, who looked after all monetary assignments to the household and the Controller who kept a counter roll of expenses.12 Because these officers were of high social rank, and were often physically absent from the household, it was the official known as the Cofferer who managed the daily expenses of the major household departments. Extant Cofferer’s accounts reveal that while the responsibilities of this official changed somewhat over the course of the reign, he continued to disburse money to the purveyors of the major household departments for diet and supplies throughout the reign.13 According to the Black Book, the sergeants of the various departments were also supposed to deposit their tallies with the Cofferer, so that they might be redeemed by the various merchants and suppliers in the localities.14 For this reason, the smooth running of the royal household depended upon a regular supply of coin into the hands of the Cofferer. It was financial constraint that limited the size of the royal household during the late middle ages. Large households placed considerable strain on surrounding areas and, while house-to-house purveyance was a thing of the past, the king’s subjects were undoubtedly affected when several hundred hungry mouths descended suddenly upon a village, demanding food and accommodation. If the Cofferer did not have enough cash in hand to redeem tallies, then local merchants and innkeepers would not be repaid. Further
12
A. R. Myers, The Household of Edward IV, The Black Book and the Ordinance of 1478 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), 144-7. 13 Public Record Office (PRO) E 101 413/5, 7, 8, 12; 414/2, 3, 5, 9, 13; 415/1, 6, 9, 12, 13, 15; 416/1. 14 Myers, Household of Edward IV, 167.
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social unrest resulted if household servants, who received wages in lieu of diet, went unpaid and were forced to obtain food and lodging by whatever means necessary—bad credit, violence or theft.15 The poor management of the treasury of the household during the reign of Henry VI (1422-1461), provoked a reaction from Parliament. The treasury’s inability to meet household running costs, which by 1449 were estimated at £24,000 per annum, had encouraged the promulgations of an ordinance that attempted to limit its size.16 Although financial recovery was seen during the reign of Edward IV, the Black Book attempted to limit the membership of the royal household, cautioning that “the kyng wull haue his goodes dispended but not wasted.”17 In 1485, Parliament authorized an increase in the annual subsidy paid to the royal household; seemingly its objective was not to underwrite the costs of expansion or enhancement, but rather to alleviate the burden placed on the king’s subjects who had, according to the Commons, “been grievously charged with continual taking of their goods and chattels for the expenses of his most honourable household whereof they have not been sufficiently contented nay paid, to their great impoverishing.”18 It had long been the expectation that English kings should “live of their own,” meaning that they should finance their households with the profits of the lands that they had controlled as individuals. By the reign of Henry VI, it was realized that this expectation was unrealistic, and in 1454, as the crown faced civil war, the king was granted a meager allowance of £5,500 to help to defray household expenses.19 Upon his accession in 1461 Edward IV began to channel his private revenues into the treasury of the chamber in order to meet costs and tackle the debt of the royal household.20 But his efforts were designed to get household finance on solid footing rather than to expand his household and Edward IV’s initial measure was to reduce household size. Although there is evidence of expansion by the end of his reign, both the Black Book and Ordinance 15 Bertram Wolffe, Henry VI (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 282-3. 16 Myers, Household of Edward IV, 63-75. 17 Myers, Household of Edward IV, 87. 18 J. Strachey et al., eds., Rotuli Parliamentorum; ut et Petitiones et Placita in Parliamento (London: s.n., 1767), 6: 299. 19 Wolffe, Henry VI, 301. 20 David Loades, The Tudor Court (London: Batsford, 1986), 74.
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of 1478 were preoccupied with economy.21 And in 1482, when Parliament agreed to raise the annual exchequer assignment to the treasury of the household to £11,000, it still fell short of the household running costs which the Black Book had estimated to be £14,000.22 By the accession of Henry VII to the throne in 1485 it is clear that the crown was in financial trouble again. The expansion of the household undertaken by Richard III was not accompanied by administrative changes that would sustain a larger household over the long term; if such changes had been on the horizon, then this king did not remain on the throne long enough to put them into play. Henry VII had an added disadvantage—unlike his Yorkist predecessors, he did not possess enough private property to help him meet the running costs of the government. Thus in 1485, Parliament increased the subsidy from £11,000 to £14,000 and augmented this sum by £2,100 to pay for supplies in the royal wardrobe.23 This increase of more than £5,000 appears to be a tacit acknowledgment of the differences between a king’s public and private wealth. As heir to the Duke of York, Edward IV had been able to put his private revenues toward household expenditure and freely channeled these receipts through the Treasury of the Chamber. Richard III was entitled to do the same with the lands he controlled as the Duke of Gloucester. However the bulk of the landed revenues available to Henry VII had been acquired through formal Acts of Attainder in Parliament, and was thus processed through the national treasury of the exchequer. Thus they could only be made available to the king through Parliamentary assignment. By 1485, the income that had traditionally financed the royal household, including revenues from the vast duchies of Cornwall and the Lancaster, was no longer controlled by the king as a private landholder, but formed part of the patrimony of the crown.24 The matter might appear to be academic, but the implicit differences between public and private wealth appeared to have had an effect on the way revenues were controlled. The household assignment
21
Myers, Household of Edward IV, 12-3. Myers, Household of Edward IV, 230; Rotuli Parliamentorum, 6: 198-202. 23 Rotuli Parliamentorum, 6: 299. 24 A description of the lands comprising the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster is provided by Colvin, History of the King’s Works, 1: 470-6. 22
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1495.28 The substitution clause of 1489, ensured that despite the fact that the revenues from these lands were actually going through the chamber, the king could collect the equivalent amount of money from other sources of public revenue, such as customs revenues or tunnage and poundage. Thus, although the assignment from the exchequer might have appeared to have been reduced from 1489 onward, in actuality Henry VII was collecting on some of this income twice. Accompanying such double dipping was a change in the way in which various expenses of the royal household were being paid for. A fragment of a document outlining household accounting procedure reveals that before 1493 the wages of most household servants: including sewers, ushers, waiters, messengers, grooms, pages and even servants of the chamber were paid by the Cofferer, from the Treasury of the Household. At this time other honorary servants such as sergeants-at-arms, carvers and cupbearers were paid directly from the exchequer. Only knights and esquires of the body received their wages from the Treasury of the Chamber.29 Yet according to the extant accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, John Heron, by the end of the reign it is evident that nearly all servants received their wages from the Treasury of the Chamber.30 Toward the end of the reign, the various accounts belonging to the Treasury of the Household reveal that the bulk of expenditure went towards diets while the Treasury of the Chamber came to underwrite other costs, such as the building expenses and entertainment. The sum of money that the treasury of the household received from the Exchequer does not appear to have increased over the course of the reign; the amount received per annum was consistent with the £13,000 per annum stipulated by Parliament.31 Although this fact seems to suggest that the expenses of the treasury of the household did not increase, the Coffer’s accounts mask a number
28
Rotuli Parliamentorum, 6: 433. PRO E 101/416/11. Given his inclusion as one of the members of the household, this document appears to predate the death of Thomas West who died in 1493. See Calendar of Patent Rolls (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1914-1916), 1: 421. 30 BL Add. 21480. 31 PRO E 101/413/4, E101/413/5, E101/413/7, E101/413/12, E101/414/2, E101/414/5, E101/414/9: E101/414/13, E101/415/6, E101/415/9, E101/415/12, E101/416/1. 29
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Chamber to the Treasury of the Household. Couched in the terminology of an indenture, the terms of this financial arrangement are laid out in a Close Letter of 1499 stating that £1,000 was to be granted to the Cofferer each month and “provided that if there are tallies that cannot be met” he would receive “allowances for the same.”34 Thus it appears that £1,000 per month was being used by Cope to redeem tallies brought to him by local merchants and suppliers and that Cope was personally liable for any of this money not accounted for. The fact that Cope continued to receive this assignment until at least 1505 suggests that the Chamber assignment became an enduring arrangement. Thus, in effect the treasury of the household was receiving a total in excess of £25,000 per year after 1499: £13,000 in assignments from the exchequer and £12,000 from the chamber to meet the cost of tallies. The diversity of payments listed in the accounts of the treasury of the chamber gives a false impression that the financial departments in operation during the reign were crude in their administration. However administrative changes undertaken during the reign of Henry VII offered treasury officials greater flexibility and reflect a marked effort to organize finances in such a way as to increase the flow of cash into the hands of the Cofferer. The exchequer of receipt channeled public monies such as customs revenues and tunnage and poundage, whereas the treasury of the chamber received profits from crown lands. And as Grummitt has shown, surplus cash from both departments came to be stored in the crown coffers in the Tower of London. The treasury of the household, once a department that handled the majority of crown expenses, was streamlined into the department that merely financed the diet and supplies of the expanding royal household. And it was the regular and reliable supply of money into this department that not only allowed Henry VII to achieve solvency and quell the complaints of the Commons, but to expand the size of his household. At the turn of the sixteenth century, Portugal presents itself as an interesting comparison to England. Although the kingdom did not suffer the same damaging effects of a long-term dynastic struggle akin to the Wars of the Roses, a devastating war with Castile (14751479) wreaked havoc on royal finances. Moreover, Afonso V (14331481) had granted lands and annuities at an unprecedented rate 34
Calendar of Close Rolls (London: Public Record Office, 1955), 1: 322.
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over the course of his long reign that further impoverished the crown. Although his successor, João II (1481-1495) worked hard to place the crown on surer financial footing, his success was limited. Lands confiscated from those nobles implicated in the conspiracies of 1483 and 1484 were soon granted out again and after 1489 the crown lost the valuable revenues from the Duchy of Viseu. Unlike the English crown, the kings of Portugal were to enjoy additional income from the profits of the overseas expansion. But until the turn of the sixteenth century the ability of the crown to fund the royal household from these revenues was limited. While the successive conquests of the North African captaincies might have been lucrative from the perspective of individual nobles, the defense of such places as Ceuta and Tangier drained crown resources. Furthermore, although the development of sugar plantations in the Atlantic islands contributed to metropolitan wealth and trade, immediate profits belonged to the Duchy of Viseu and were exempt from crown taxation. And although the construction of the important trading fort of São Jorge da Mina, begun in 1482, was to play an important role in stimulating trade—the effects were not seen until the end of the reign.35 Until the turn of the sixteenth century, the crown remained plagued by financial shortfall that placed limitations on the size of the royal household. While the Portuguese crown was able to maintain the royal household on a system of credit, its repeated failure to meet costs outraged the Cortes. In the session of 1459, representatives demanded that the king exercise moderation in household expenditure and in 1472-1473 it was explicitly requested that Afonso V reduce the size of the royal household.36 Representative assemblies expressed a willingness to provide for the royal household, but only if the crown exercised restraint. Even as late as 1498, the Cortes entreated the king to keep a moderate household.37 The complaints of these representatives reflected the frustrations of a populace burdened by crown debt and it is evident from the cartas das quitações that even as late
35 Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, Ensaios II, Sobre história de Portugal (Lisbon: Sá da Costa, 1978), 55. 36 Armindo da Sousa, As Cortes medievais portuguesas, 1385-1490 (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1990), 363, 384. 37 João José Alves Dias, ed., Cortes portuguesas: Reinado de D. Manuel, Cortes de 1498 (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos, 2002), 179.
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nues was derived from the customary taxes of the sisa and the dizima. The sisa, which formed nearly three quarters of crown revenues in the fifteenth century, was levied on any merchant activity or sales and was most often paid at trade fairs on wine, cereals, meat, colored cloth and imported textiles. Very few exemptions were granted on the sisa, and nobility and even royalty were obliged to pay this tax.42 The dizima, on the other hand, was levied on all imports by sea and on goods coming through dry ports. Given the volume of trade coming through Portuguese ports in the fifteenth century, the yields from this tax should have been lucrative.43 The stumbling block was that the system of collection and delivery to the central coffers of the Casa dos Contos was inefficient. It is often assumed that social and economic change occurring in Portugal in the early sixteenth century was attributable to the windfall of the Indian Ocean spice trade. While extraordinary riches were indeed dumped in the lap of Manuel I (whose unabashed epithet was “the Fortunate”), his good luck has masked the concerted efforts put forth by his administration to instigate reform and increase revenues from domestic sources. Like Henry VII, Manuel I inherited a kingdom rife with political faction. Few records are left that can testify to the effect which the conflicts and confiscations had on revenue collection at a local level, but it can be surmised that war in the 1470s and the purges of the nobility that took place in the 1480s brought an added confusion to the networks of crown administration operating in the localities. If the profits of the sisa and the dizima were the main sources of cash feeding the coffers of the household, then interruptions in their collection would have had a direct impact on its operation. The efforts of the Manueline administration to reform local practices of revenue collection in the early years of the reign can therefore be seen as a conscious attempt by the king to increase his ability to finance the royal household.
42
Exempt from this tax were gold, silver, baked bread, horses and arms. João Cordeiro Pereira, Para a história das Alfândegas em Portugal no início do século XVI (Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1983), 22-6. 43 Once rated as a tenth of the balance of trade, rules and rates changed during successive reigns in the fifteenth century. Amendments to the dizimas were made during the reigns of D. João I and D. Afonso V to combat abuse. See “Dizimas,” in Joel Serrão, ed., Dicionário de história de Portugal (Lisbon: Iniciativas Editoriais, 1979), 2: 326.
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Compared to his predecessor João II, Manuel I was a much wealthier king, even before his proverbial ships came in. As heir to the Duchy of Viseu, Manuel I was able to draw upon lands and income worth more than twenty-eight million réis.44 While much of this land was granted away in the decades to come, these added revenues gave him an initial cash injection as well as the ability to buy the support of various sections of the political elite at the time when he first took the throne. Similar to the practice of Henry VII, Manuel I authorized commissions to investigate the condition of the administrative machinery. In 1496 the king sent a commission led by his chancellor Dr. Rui Boto, to examine local charters in order to assess obligations of taxation and to perform a local survey establishing the lands held in feudal tenure. These enquiries would have provided information about the effectiveness of local administrative officials as well as up to date information about the rents and taxes owed by towns and independent landholders. Ostensibly they provided the background information that prompted the program of administrative reform enacted later in the reign.45 During the reign, a number of reforms were put into effect, many of which had a perceptible impact on revenue collection. Notable among these reforms were the Ordenações Manuelinas, first published in 1514 but reissued in 1521. They clearly articulated the duties, obligations and procedures to be followed by crown agents and officials. In addition, the reign witnessed the standardization of weights and measures and also the reissue of town charters. Both of these latter reforms would have had direct repercussions on revenue collection because they controlled prices and established concrete guidelines enabling crown agents to better enforce the payment of the sisa. Also, in 1516 the king and his ministers oversaw the reform of the financial administration of the entire kingdom, known as the fazenda. While the reforms undertaken over the course of the reign might seem to demonstrate an altruistic interest in good government and civil harmony, they undoubtedly reflect, to a significant degree, the self-interest of the crown. It remains that the administrative re-
44 Damião de Góis, Crónica de D. Manuel (Coimbra: University da Coimbra, 1949), 1: 24. 45 João José Alves Dias, ed. Portugal do Renascimento à Crise Dinástica, (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1998), 714.
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forms put into effect had a perceived effect on domestic revenue, evidenced by the claims of Vitorino Magalhães Godinho that crown revenues increased by fifty per cent between 1506 and 1518, rising from sixty-six million réis (£38,000) to nearly a hundred million réis (£54,000).46 It is important to recognize that the reforms of the fazenda were not enacted merely to impose an academic sense of order upon the network of financial administration. Virginia Rau has argued that the Portuguese crown increased the efficiency of revenue connection by separating the departments of collection and audit. Thus under the new system, officials called Contadores were entrusted with the task of collecting rents and chasing down withheld payments, while the officials known as Almoxarifes, who had once performed these duties, were responsible for conducting the audits. But, as Rau notes herself, the Almoxarifes continued to administer and collect the sisa which, as mentioned, remained one of the main sources of crown revenue.47 It appears that rather than legislating a strict division between officials of audit and collection, what the crown was attempting to do was to speed up the process by which money made its way to the central coffers. Taken at the point of sale, the sisa could be assessed, collected and processed much more quickly than annual rents; officials designated as Recebedores, or Receivers, of the sisa could channel the profits to the central administration on a more regular basis. Contadores, who were burdened with the more cumbersome task of rent collection would be given more time to complete their duties. One of the provisions of the fazenda reforms was the regulation of the tax schedule so that both taxpayers and officials could thus anticipate the process of collection and get their accounts in order. Every two years, the Contadores would have been summoned to Lisbon in order to render their accounts to the central authorities, headed by the Vedores da Fazenda. Thus, every other January, Contadores collected money owed to the crown and conveyed the 46 The increase in revenues from the individual almoxarifados can be exemplified by Guarda, where revenues went from £27 (47,500 rs.) in 1496, to £31 (54,700 rs.) in 1504, to £65 (113,000 rs.) in 1510, leveling out between 1516 and 1521 at £245 (430,000 rs.). See “Finanças públicas e estrutura do estado,” in Serrão, Dicionário, 3: 32-3. 47 Virginia Rau, A Casa dos Contos (Coimbra: Faculdade de Letras, 1951), 62-7.
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amounts to the Almoxarife. Balances were then to be settled by the middle of February, and the Contadores would then assemble their reports to present to the Vedores da Fazenda and their deputies in the late spring and summer.48 By relieving the Almoxarife from the responsibility of collecting rents and by remitting the revenues from this source separately, the crown greatly increased the efficiency of the system of revenue collection. Apart from reorganizing the financial administration of the kingdom, changes to the system of household finance also increased the ability of the crown to access money in order to pay for the royal household. The changes undertaken at the level of the royal household were aimed at making the financial administration more flexible in order to channel the increased revenues directly into the hands of the Escrivão da Camara. Thus, in 1504, the king appointed a new official, known as the Provedor, to act as a liaison between the national treasury known as the Casa dos Contos and the Escrivão da Camara. Since the household does not appear to have generated any significant source of revenue, and because the process of audit was undertaken by the Vedores da Fazenda, it can be assumed that the primary purpose of this official was to communicate the financial needs of the royal household to the Casa dos Contos and to ensure that the necessary sums of money were brought into the coffers of the household. A decade later, the formal structure of the financial administration was altered in order to reflect the fact that the royal household was now drawing its income freely from the profits of the kingdom. Whereas beforehand the department that had regulated the expenses of the royal household had been termed the Contos do Rei and was separate from the Casa dos Contos, the new department was an amalgamation of the two and was called the Contos da Casa e Reino.49 The impact of this reorganization on the financial footing of the royal household becomes immediately apparent when one examines the way that the issue of lodging was handled. At the turn of the sixteenth century, accommodation for the king and his dependents was managed by local counting houses called aposentadorias, which 48 Rau, Casa dos Contos, Alenquer and Setúbal. On On 1 July: contadores of Moncorvo. 49 Rau, Casa dos Contos,
62-7. On 1 May: Contador Mor, Santarém, Leiria, 1 June: Évora, Beja, Coimbra, Viseu and Guarda. the Algarve, Porto, Guimarães and Tôrre de 27.
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were supervised by a crown official known as the Aposentador Mor. This official was responsible for ascertaining the numbers of people at court who were entitled to lodging through the royal household, and then worked with the local aposentadorias to requisition the appropriate number of beds. Although the king’s subjects were required by law to provide housing for the members of the court when it was in residence in their village or town, the crown was obliged to remunerate both innkeepers and private citizens for the lodging and food provided. The failure of previous kings to meet these payments and the tendency of members of the court to abuse their privileges had roused an endless number of complaints in the Cortes. By 1513, however, the position of Aposentador Mor, which had been filled at least until 1497, seems to have been rendered obsolete and is not mentioned in the Ordenações Manuelinas.50 Instead, the departments of the aposentadorias of the three cities—Santarém, Lisbon and Évora—where the court was most frequently in residence, came under the direct control of one of the Vedores da Fazenda. At the same time, crown revenue agents came partially under the authority of the aposentadorias.51 What these changes implied is that revenues, such as those derived from the sisa, that were collected in these areas, could be used to directly pay for the debts incurred by the aposentadorias. This shift undoubtedly allowed the aposentadorias of Lisbon, Santarém and Évora to rapidly pay off the debts that they had been accruing since 1477.52 For the royal household, the road to financial recovery in the earlier part of the reign lay in its ability to access the increased revenues coming in from the almoxarifados. But it cannot be denied that the great injection of wealth brought into the hands of the Portuguese crown from the profits of the emergent spice trade was to have a major impact on the development of the royal court. In 1506, around the time when the gold trade had reached its peak, this income contributed a sizeable forty million réis or £23,000 to crown revenues and profits from the spice trade were about the same—forty-four million réis or £25,000. Twelve years later, the
50
AN/TT, Leitura Nova, Estremadura, liv. 2, fol. 128v. AN/TT, Chancelarias D. Manuel, liv. 12, fol. 57; liv. 42, fol. 12v.; Chancelarias D. João III, liv. 17, fol. 23. 52 AN/TT, Chancelarias D. Manuel, liv. 7, fol. 44v. 51
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amount of revenue generated by the spice trade was close to one hundred million réis or £55,000.53 The vast quantities of cash, spices and other moveable goods that tumbled into the harbour warehouses in the port of Lisbon presented a golden opportunity for the cash-strapped Portuguese royal household. In 1501, the crown established the joint Casa da Índia e Guiné in order to manage the profits from both the spice trade and gold trade. If the royal household had once suffered because of a dearth of cash or saleable goods, then the monetary surplus allowed household officials to redeem tallies and pay for necessary provisions from this department. It can be no coincidence that the Casa da Índia e Guiné came to be located in the Ribeira Palace complex. Begun in 1505, this opulent edifice on the main commercial square of the River Tagus replaced the castle of São Jorge as the residence of the royal court when it was housed in Lisbon.54 The royal court thus began to siphon off the wealth generated through overseas trade and diverted it in order to finance the royal household. Despite the fact that increased revenues were coming in from domestic sources, money from the Casa da Índia e Guiné was more readily usable. If one examines the changes in the money used to pay the stipends or moradias of the kings dependents, the relationship between the court and the Casa da Índia e Guiné, (later the Casa da Índia) becomes obvious. In 1498, more than forty per cent of the money being taken to pay the living allowances of the fidalgos resident at court came from the kingdom, either as receipts from the almoxarifados or other revenues associated with regular taxation. About twenty per cent of the income derived from customs subsidies while another twenty per cent came from foreign trade, most of which comprised profits from sugar from Madeira, which had been part of the patrimony of the Duchy of Viseu that Manuel I was able to bring with him to the throne. Just over ten years later, more than half of these revenues derived from overseas sources and the majority came from the pepper trade. Money from the almoxarifados and rents consisted of about only twenty per cent of the money received by the fazenda; the amount being received from customs was about
53
“Finanças públicas,” 3: 33. Damião de Góis, Descrição da Cidade de Lisboa (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1988), 61. 54
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In general, Henry VII increased revenues by ensuring that his receivers were both loyal and efficient and by exercising his prerogative in all cases where he stood to profit. But it was not enough for the king to merely generate income—he had to make sure that the monetary surplus was channeled directly into the central coffers. At least £13,000 was guaranteed to the king by way of exchequer assignment which was ostensibly to be comprised of customs revenues and other public money coming from landed estates confiscated through acts of attainder. Even when Henry VII began to divert revenues from crown land, both public and private through the Treasury of the Chamber, he continued to collect the full sum of the assignment, substituting other revenues from the sources specified by Parliament. Over the course of the reign, the financial departments of the kingdom were reorganized so that the Treasury of the Household paid only for the diet and supplies of the household—which required a steady influx of cash; and, after 1499, in addition to the income received from the exchequer, the Cofferer of the household received an additional £1,000 per month. Developments in the financial administration of Portugal suggest that Manuel I had a similar priority of providing adequate and regular funding for the royal household. The Manueline Reforms of 1516 allowed the Almoxarifes to streamline their process of revenue collection and to rapidly funnel the profits of the sisa into the central coffers. The reform and standardization of urban charters or foros helped to regulate prices and thus normalize taxation. The standardization of weights and measures, achieved during the reign, also helped crown agents in this task. Even before the windfall of the India trade deluged the warehouses of Lisbon, the crown facilitated the financing of the royal household by making alterations in its personnel. The creation of the office of Provedor in 1504 allowed money to be carried freely between the counting house and the royal household and this link was formalized with the formation of the amalgamated department of the Contos da Casa e Reino. The replacement of the Aposentador Mor by one of the Vedores da Fazenda as the official in charge of organizing and paying for accommodation for the royal household epitomised the crown’s objective of properly funding the royal household and this move drastically reduced the red-tape involved in paying for lodgings. Finally, the construction of the Ribeira Palace, which jointly housed the king’s household and the Casa da
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Índia allowed the court to directly draw upon the revenue and saleable goods coming from India. Reforms affecting the financial administration in both England and Portugal at the turn of the sixteenth century were precipitated by the kings’ determination to expand the size of the royal household. This development may have been stimulated by a wish to keep up with expanding courts elsewhere in Europe as well as to extend and strengthen their political connections within their kingdoms. Yet in the century that preceded the reigns of Henry VII and Manuel I, the monarchs of England and Portugal had faced great difficulty in paying the diets and wages of a household restricted in numbers— previous kings had difficulties achieving solvency, let alone expansion. The ability of the kings to enlarge their households depended on their ability to channel money into the hands of the Treasurers of their household and many of the major reforms undertaken in these reigns were designed to do just this. The changes that rendered crown finance more efficient were not undertaken in a spirit of altruism; nor were legal reforms and the standardization of weights and measures seen in both kingdoms for the benefit of the kings’ subjects alone and the self interest of the two monarchs is evident in the spoils raked in by their tax collectors.
WARFARE, SHIPPING, AND CROWN PATRONAGE: THE IMPACT OF THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR ON THE PORT TOWNS OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND Maryanne Kowaleski
The debate on the economic costs and social consequences of the Hundred Years War has been part of most economic history syllabi since the 1960s when M. M. Postan published a negative view and K. B. McFarlane a more positive assessment of the impact of the war on the English economy.1 The debate has since developed many strands, from A. R. Bridbury’s argument that there was nothing special about the Hundred Years War in a society in which war was a constant factor, to conflicting analyses of the impact of rising war taxation.2 Other scholars have focused on the costs and bene1
K. B. McFarlane, “War, the Economy, and Social Change: England and the Hundred Years’ War,” Past and Present 22 (1962), 3-13, with discussion on 13-18; reprinted in K. B. McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), 139-50. M. M. Postan, “The Costs of the Hundred Years’ War,” in Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 63-86, first published in Past and Present, no. 27 (1964), 34-53; and see also, M. M. Postan, “Some Social Consequences of the Hundred Years’ War,” in Essays on Medieval Agriculture, 49-62, first published in Economic History Review, 1st ser., 12 (1942): 1-12. J. W. Sherborne, “The Hundred Years War: The English Navy: Shipping and Manpower,” Past and Present 37 (1967), 163-75. See also a review of the debate in Philippe Contamine, “Le coût de la Guerre de Cent Ans en Angleterre,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 20 (1965): 788-91. 2 A. R. Bridbury, “The Hundred Years’ War: Costs and Profits,” in Trade, Government, and Economy in Pre-Industrial England: Essays Presented to F. J. Fisher, ed. D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), 80-95. For discussions of the impact of war taxation, see especially Edward Miller, “War, Taxation, and the English Economy in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries,” in War and Economic Development: Essays in Memory of David Joslin, ed. J. M. Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 11-32; G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); J. R. Maddicott, The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294-1341 (Past and Present Supplement no. 1, Oxford, 1975), J. W. Sherborne, “The Cost of English Warfare with France in the Later Fourteenth Century,” Bulletin of the
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fits—through ransom, plunder, and the award of offices—to the aristocratic elite which led the war effort.3 John Munro has made particularly valuable contributions to the debate by pointing out how the disruptive effects of warfare from the 1290s through 1340s contributed to an industrial transformation in the textile trades.4 This essay concentrates on an overlooked but crucial part of the debate by exploring how the Anglo-French conflicts affected the shipping available in British port towns, particularly during the fourteenth century. Although historians have long noted the devastating impact on ports of naval impressments, coastal raids, privateering, and the disruption of maritime trade routes during the Hundred Years War,5 no one has focused exclusively on port towns and few Institute of Historical Research 50 (1977): 135-50; J. R. Strayer, “The Costs and Profits of War: The Anglo-French Conflict of 1294-1303,” in The Medieval City, ed. H. A. Miskimin, D. Herlihy, A. L. Udovitch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 269-92; W. M. Ormrod, “The Crown and the English Economy, 1290-1348,” in Before the Black Death: Studies in the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century, ed. B. M. S. Campbell (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), 149-83; W. M. Ormrod, “The Domestic Response to the Hundred Years War,” in Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War, ed. Anne Curry and Michael Hughes (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1994), 83-101. 3 For example, K. B. McFarlane, “The Investment of Sir John Fastolf’s Profits of War,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 7 (1957): 91-116; and K. B. McFarlane, “A Business Partnership in War and Administration 1421-1445,” English Historical Review 78 (1963): 290-316; A. J. Pollard, John Talbot and the War in France 1427-1453 (London: Humanities Press, 1983); Simon Walker, “Profit and Loss in the Hundred Years War: The Subcontracts of Sir John Strother, 1374,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 58 (1985): 100-6. 4 J. H. Munro, “Industrial Transformations in the North-West European Textile Trades, c. 1290-c. 1340: Economic Progress or Economic Crisis?” in Before the Black Death, 110-48. See also his “The ‘New Institutional Economics’ and the Changing Fortunes of Fairs in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Textile Trades, Warfare, and Transaction Costs,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 88 (2001): 1-47. 5 See, for example, Postan, “Costs of the Hundred Years War,” 64, 68; C. F. Richmond, “War at Sea,” in The Hundred Years War, ed. Kenneth Fowler (London: Macmillan, 1971), 96-121; Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War c. 1300-c. 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 88-9, 122-23; Sherborne, “English Navy, Shipping and Manpower;” Michael Hughes, “The Fourteenth-Century French Raids on Hampshire and the Isle of Wight,” in Arms, Armies and Fortifications, 121-43; N. A. M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain 660-1649 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 91-116; Maryanne Kowaleski, “Port Towns: England and Wales 1300-1540,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ed.
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have discussed shipping, although it represented the chief form of capital investment in port towns. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the value of ships probably outstripped all other forms of industrial investment in England during the middle ages.6 In focusing on shipping and port towns, I want to query the uniformly negative view of the War’s impact on the maritime economy, a view which has been promulgated by historians such as J. W. Sherborne, who has argued—as part of the Past and Present debate between McFarlane and Postan—that coastal areas suffered from shouldering a greater proportion of the costs of war than inland regions.7 What I would like to suggest here, however, is that the picture is not as unrelievedly grim as naval and economic historians have claimed. The entrepreneurial merchants, shipowners, and mariners of English port towns sometimes found ways to profit from the War, particularly in the western ports (those from Hampshire westwards, around Devon, Cornwall, and Wales, and up the coast to Cumbria). The essential contributions of the port towns to the war effort, moreover, made the Crown increasingly open to their interests, more likely to address their petitions, and inclined to reward them with charters and other privileges. When the English kings needed ships to transport troops and supplies, patrol the coast, or engage the enemy at sea, they had three options. One was to call on the Cinque Ports, a confederation of south-eastern port towns which owed 57 manned ships for two weeks of service a year in return for a number of privileges and tax exemptions. But the Cinque Ports were rarely able to fulfill this quota by the fourteenth century because of the silting of their ports and war-time interruptions of the maritime trade on which their
D. M. Palliser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1: 469-70, 473. 6 Maryanne Kowaleski, “Shipowners and Shipping in Medieval England,” unpublished paper given at the 38th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 2003. 7 Sherborne, “English Navy, Shipping and Manpower;” see also his “The Battle of La Rochelle and the War at Sea, 1372-5,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 47 (1969): 17-29. Other historians who have emphasized the negative costs of the Hundred Years War to the maritime sector include: H. J. Hewitt, The Organization of War Under Edward III 1338-62 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966); and Timothy Runyan, “Ships and Mariners in Later Medieval England,” Journal of British Studies 16 (1977): 1-17.
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economies relied.8 A second option was for kings to build or purchase ships of their own, although this alternative was rarely pursued because of its enormous cost. In fact, the king’s ships never represented more than 4 per cent of the fleets employed in the fourteenth-century naval campaigns.9 These vessels, moreover, were considered the kings’ personal property and could be sold or given away at any time.10 The third and most commonly used option was to impress mercantile shipping into naval service. Many of these cargo ships were cogs, which had to be specially outfitted with sterncastles and topcastles for war-time service, or with hurdles and gangways if they were to transport horses. To impress these merchant ships for naval duty, royal officials traveled from port town to port town to supervise their arrest, an activity which became much more frequent and onerous for shipowners from the 1290s on.11 Ships could be impressed before their voyage was completed, forced to unload their goods before they reached their final destination, or diverted to another port to pick up goods or troops for a period of weeks or even months at a time.12 Impressed ships could also be captured or destroyed and their crews held to ransom or killed. By the late 1340s the constant impressment of merchant vessels was provoking bitter complaints from port towns, who pointed out the unreasonable burdens that shipowners were expected to bear since they received no compensation for their ships when on naval service and also lost 8
K. M. E. Murray, The Constitutional History of the Cinque Ports (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1935), 206-16; May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century 1307-1399 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 243; N. A. M. Rodger, “The Naval Service of the Cinque Ports,” English Historical Review 110 (1996): 636-51. 9 Rodger, Safeguard, 118. 10 When Henry V died, for example, the superb fleet of some 40 ships that he had assembled was sold—on his order—to pay off his debts; see Colin Richmond, “The Keeping of the Seas during the Hundred Years War: 1422-1440,” History 49 (1964): 285-7. For a similar sale to settle Edward III’s debts, see Runyan, “Ships and Mariners,” 9. 11 Many of the accounts survive, showing their routes and work at each port; see, for example, The National Archives, Public Record Office [hereafter PRO] E101/40/21, 41/33, 53/39. See also Rodger, Safeguard, 118-25. 12 For example: McKisack, Fourteenth Century, 244; Hewitt, Organization, 77; Timothy J. Runyan, “The Organization of Royal Fleets in Medieval England,” in Essays in Maritime History, ed. Timothy J. Runyan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 44-9.
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out on the commercial freightage they could have earned.13 The dissatisfaction port towns felt about these naval burdens was evident in the slowness with which many met the king’s orders for ships, in outright disobedience by shipmasters who either ignored the ship call or left naval service prematurely to take on a commercial cargo, and by the mounting chorus of petitions from port towns and their residents regarding what they viewed as excessive and unfair burdens on their purse.14 From the Crown’s point of view, the chief benefit of this reliance on mercantile shipping was its relatively low cost compared to what it would have to spend to build and maintain a permanent navy. Although naval historians—many with the model of the modern navy foremost in their minds—have for years lamented the inefficiency and slow response time of the medieval naval system, they also acknowledge the Crown’s creative financing in transferring the costs of shipping, crews, and victualling to port towns.15 The Crown was even able to shift the costs of purpose-built barges and balingers (oared vessels especially suited to war at sea because of their maneuverability) to port towns by instructing them to build ships for the navy on five different occasions from 1294 to 1401.16 Town revenues 13 Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous [hereafter CIM], vol. III (London: H.M.S.O., 1937), no. 14; Calendar of Close Rolls [hereafter CCR] 1349-54 (London: H.M.S.O., 1906), 550-1; Rotuli Parliamentorum [hereafter Rot. Parl.], 7 vols. (London, 1783-1832), 2: 320, 345, 346; 3: 66; for newly edited texts and translations, see W. M. Ormrod, ed., “Parliament of November 1373, Text and Translation,” (hereafter “Parliament of [ ... ]),” The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. C. Given-Wilson et al. (CD-ROM, Leicester: Scholarly Editions, 2005) [hereafter PROME], item 29; W.M. Ormrod, ed., “Parliament of April 1376,” PROME, items 133, 136; G. H. Martin, ed., “Parliament of April 1379,” PROME, item 50. 14 For example: CCR 1343-46, 128-34; Calendar of Patent Rolls [hereafter CPR] 1348-50 (London: H.M.S.O., 1905), 72, 448; Rot. Parl., 2: 307; Ormrod, ed., “Parliament of February 1371,” PROME, item 32. See also Sherborne, “Navy, Shipping and Manpower,” 164-66; Hewitt, Organization, 77, 83. 15 Runyan, “Ships and Mariners;” Rodger, Safeguard, 118-25. See also Hewitt, Organization, 89. 16 In 1294 the Crown ordered 30 towns to provide a total of 20 large galleys or barges. We know that at least eight of these vessels were constructed, at considerable expense to the port towns. The barge provided by Southampton, for instance, cost the town £246, while London’s two barges cost the city over £580 in a five-month period. This experiment was enough of a success, however, that the cash-strapped Edward III increasingly resorted to this practice, ordering six barges in 1354, at least 70 barges and balingers in 1373, another 32 in 1377, and an additional 54 in 1401. See below, n.48; R.
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were nowhere near enough to pay for these new ships, so port towns had to raise the money from their own citizens. In Exeter, for instance, the money came from a special rate assessed on the richer burgesses, along with a smaller sum granted by the king from a tenth. Nonetheless, the barge that Exeter built in 1374-75 cost over £200 at a time when the town revenues were in the neighborhood of only £100-£120 a year. And a few years later, in 1377, the town was ordered to provide yet another barge, a cost it only grudgingly met.17 The War also cost the port towns in other ways. Enemy coastal raids became a particular danger during the Hundred Years War, targeting ports from Scarborough to Haverfordwest in Wales.18 To counteract these threats, port towns were forced to spend significant amounts to construct and maintain seaward defenses, such as chains strung along harbor entrances, artillery fortifications, and reinforced stone walls and towers. War-time disruption of overseas trade routes was also costly. The lucrative annual voyage to Bordeaux to fetch wine, for instance, used to bring back some 20,000 tuns of wine a year to England in the first decade of the fourteenth century, but that amount fell to about 10,000 tuns a year by the end of the fourteenth century and even less by the mid-fifteenth century, though Gascony was still in English hands.19 Shipowners also had to absorb the costs of armed convoy ships when they went to Gascony during J. Whitwell, “The ‘Newcastle’ Galley, A.D.1294,” Archaeologia aeliana, 4th series, 2 (1926): 142-96; R. C. Anderson, “English Galleys in 1295,” Mariners’ Mirror 14 (1928), 220-41; J. T. Tinniswood, “English Galleys, 1272-1377,” Mariners’ Mirror 35 (1949): 276-315; Ian Friel, “The Building of the Lyme Galley, 12941296,” Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 108 (1986): 41-4; Rodger, Safeguard, 473-5. 17 Devon Record Office [hereafter D.R.O.], Exeter City Archives, Miscellaneous Roll 6, m. 17 [for the special rate] and mm. 17, 17a, 25-28 [for the building and repair accounts of the barge in 1374-75 and 1376-77]. The annual town accounts are in DRO, Exeter City Archives, Receiver’s Accounts. For barges that Exeter was ordered to build for the king, see also CPR 1354-58, 221; Thomas Rymer, comp., Foedera, conventiones, litterae, et cujuscumque generis acta publica inter reges Angliae ..., ed. Adam Clarke, John Caley, and Frederick Holbrooke (London, Record Commission, 1816-69) 3 vols. in 6 [hereafter Foedera], 3/ii, 998-9; 4: 28; CCR 1399-1402, 238. For the financial difficulties faced by other towns ordered to build similar barges, see above, n.16. 18 Kowaleski, “Port Towns,” 469, for this and the following. 19 Margery K. James, Studies in the Medieval Wine Trade, ed. E. M. Veale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 10, 39, 41-3, 107-16.
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wartime, and, by the fifteenth century, the costs of ‘wafting’: protective convoys for the Yarmouth fishing fleets.20 Piracy and privateering also took their toll during the tumultuous war years, as when 25 English ships returning from Brittany with cargoes of salt were attacked and either captured or burnt by a Spanish fleet.21 The picture painted here reflects the traditional, accepted view of the impact of warfare on late medieval shipping and the port towns’ economies. I accept this picture too, but I do not believe it tells the whole story. The remainder of the essay, therefore, considers how the kings’ wars could also promote economic development and political empowerment. Some of these opportunities have been acknowledged by scholars. War profiteering, for example, obviously enriched some merchants and shipowners, particularly those in northern ports such as Newcastle, Hull, and Scarborough which served as supply points during the Scottish wars.22 Other ports prospered when they served as embarkation ports for naval fleets, especially when ships and their crews were forced to wait weeks until favorable winds or sufficient supplies arrived. The capture of Calais increased traffic through Sandwich, while Plymouth benefited from the more frequent expeditions to Brittany and Gascony.23 South20 James, Studies in the Wine Trade, 125-33; Maryanne Kowaleski, “The Commercialization of the Sea Fisheries in Medieval England and Wales,” International Journal of Maritime History, 15:2 (2003): 196-7. 21 Richmond, “Keeping of the Seas;” Stephen P. Pistono, “Flanders and the Hundred Years War: The Quest for the Trêve Marchande,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 49 (1976): 185-97; C. J. Ford, “Piracy or Policy: The Crisis in the Channel, 1400-1403,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 29 (1979): 63-77. 22 Rosemary Horrox, The De La Poles of Hull (East Yorkshire Local History Society Series, no. 38, 1983), 9-27; Bryan Waites, “The Medieval Ports and Trade of North-East Yorkshire,” Mariner’s Mirror 63 (1977): 138; C. M. Fraser, “The Life and Death of John of Denton,” Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th series, 37 (1959): 303-25. 23 For this and the following, see M. Oppenheim, “Maritime History,” in The Victoria History of the County of Kent, ed. W. Page (London: Constable, 1926), 2: 247, 269; H. J. Hewitt, The Black Prince’s Expedition of 1355-1357 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), 25-6, 36-8, 92-3, 148-9; Maryanne Kowaleski, “The Port Towns of Fourteenth-Century Devon,” in The New Maritime History of Devon, ed. M. Duffy et al. (London: Conway Press, 1992), 1: 63; L. G. Carr Laughton, “Maritime History,” in The Victoria History of the County of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, ed. W. Page (London: Constable, 1912), 5: 360-8; Barbara Carpenter Turner, “Southampton as a Naval Centre, 1414- 1458,” in Collected Essays on Southampton, ed. J. B. Morgan and P. Pederdy (Southampton: Southampton County Borough Council, 1961),
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ampton and Portsmouth became major naval bases, homes to extensive shipbuilding enterprises for the royal fleet. The shipbuilding that the king ordered so many ports to undertake also provided employment and training for a body of skilled shipwrights, in addition to channeling business to the merchants and shopkeepers who furnished naval supplies and victuals.24 What has not been fully recognized, however, are some of the other ways that the Hundred Years War altered the profile of port towns on the national stage. The kings’ growing reliance on shipping to carry out their territorial ambitions, for example, stimulated more recognition and appreciation of the contributions that shipowners, shipmasters, and mariners could make to strategic planning. Indeed, the Crown increasingly went out of its way to consult these shipping experts, going so far as to summon them to the so-called “Councils of Shipping” and “Naval Parliaments” in the mid and late fourteenth century. In 1326 the king’s admirals were ordered to bring two men from each port who were well informed about shipping to London to advise the king and his Council.25 In 1339 shipmasters and mariners were issued writs to appear in Parliament, and their presence is reflected in agreements during the Parliament of 1340 to provide shipping to combat the French threat, as well as passage of a tax to provide for the safety of the sea.26 And on eight other occasions in the middle decades of the fourteenth century—in 1336, 1341, 1342, 1344, 1347, 1369, 1374 and 1376—as many as forty to fifty ports were ordered to each send one to four experienced mariners or men knowledgeable about shipping to advise the King’s Council at Westminster on nautical matters.27 These specific calls to 39-47. 24 Ian Friel, The Good Ship: Ships, Shipbuilding and Technology in England 1200-1520 (London: British Museum Press, 1995), 39-67; Susan Rose, ed., The Navy of the Lancastrian Kings: Accounts and Inventories of William Soper, Keeper of the King’s Ships, 1422-1427 (Navy Records Society, v. 123, 1982). 25 CCR 1323-27, 566. 26 Rot. Parl., 2: 107, 108; Ormrod, ed., “Parliament of January 1340,” PROME, items 5, 11, 12; W. M. Ormrod, “Edward III: Parliament of January 1340, Introduction,” PROME. 27 Report on the Dignity of a Peer of the Realm (London, 1826), 4: Appendix, Part II, 469-70, 526, 527, 539-40; Foedera, 2/ii, 1150; 1193; 3/i, 4, 105-6; 3/ii, 880-1, 1002. See also Nicholas Harris Nicolas, A History of the Royal Navy, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1847), 2: 74, 82-3, 95, 152; and Rodger, Safeguard, 124-5. Their ability to articulate maritime needs also prompted in 1347 the first grant of tonnage and poundage, customs duties levied to help
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include shipping experts in political deliberations at such a high level deserve more attention, not least because of the influence they must have exerted in the flood of parliamentary petitions and decisions concerning shipping and the navy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The growing political clout of the shipping industry is evident in the Crown’s more positive responses to shipowners’ grievances from the mid-fourteenth century on. An allowance for wear and tear on the masts of ships pressed into naval service was made available in 1378, and in 1380 shipowners were finally granted regular compensation for the impressments of their ships.28 Called “ton-tight”, this compensation was paid at the rate of 3s 4d per ton for each three-month period of service. The allowance fell to 2s per ton when the grant was renewed in 1385, but it rose again in subsequent years and some form of monetary payment to shipowners became a regular feature of most naval impressments from this time forward.29 By at least 1338, moreover, knights and men-at-arms going overseas for wartime service had to pay shipowners to transport their horses, at the rate of 6s 8d per horse.30 Further concespay for the ships involved in the siege of Calais that year. 28 Rot. Parl. 3: 86, 212; Chris Given-Wilson, ed., “Parliament of January 1380,” PROME, item 47; Given-Wilson, ed., “Parliament of October 1385,” PROME, item 28. Although 1380 was the first time that ton-tight was made a regular payment, it had been given to shipowners on an ad hoc basis from at least the late thirteenth century. In 1301, for instance, shipowners negotiated for a rate of 7s per ton; British Library, Add. Ms. 7966a, fols. 102-3, 130-31; CCR 1296-1302, 482-83. See also Michael Prestwich, War, Politics and Finance under Edward I (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972), 145. 29 For example, ton-tight was back to 3s 4d per ton for every three months of service by the reign of Henry V; PRO, E101/48/15, Rot. Parl., 4: 79, 104; Given- Wilson, ed., “Parliament of March 1416,” PROME, item 31; GivenWilson, ed., “Parliament of October 1416,” PROME, item 27. The regularity of ton-tight payments is also evident in the practice, from the late fourteenth century on, of recording the tonnage of each ship impressed for service; in many cases, the shipowner (who would have received the ton-tight payment) is also noted. By the 1480s, shipowners were receiving 1s a ton per month, a sum closer to commercial freightage; see Rodger, Safeguard, 125. 30 Bryce Lyon, “The Infrastructure and Purpose of an English Medieval Fleet in the First Phase of the Hundred Years War (1338-1340),” Handelingen der Maatschappij voor geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, n.s., 51 (1997): 73 n.19; Mary Lyon, Bryce Lyon, Henry S. Lucas, eds., The Wardrobe Book of William de Norwell: 12 July to 27 May 1340 (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1983), passim. In 1358, the rate for those joining the Gascon expedition was
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sions included more substantial reimbursement for the war-time loss of impressed ships (although this did not always happen), and explicit instructions reserving a portion of plunder taken at sea to shipowners.31 Starting in 1381 there was also a big push to restrict the transport of English-owned imports and exports to English ships because the increased business, the petitioners stated, would strengthen the merchant fleet on which the king relied for naval service.32 These petitions not only prompted statute legislation, but also increased in scope as they continued into the reign of Henry VII. The shipowners’ lobby was also probably behind parliamentary legislation forbidding confiscation of a ship when it carried uncustomed merchandise, and exempting ships from being forfeited as deodand when a mariner fell out and drowned.33 Other parliamentary petitions put forward by shipowners included release from responsibility for the misdeeds of their mariners (which could result in the forfeiture of the ship) and continual complaints about the misuse of safe-conducts by foreign shippers; the latter petition prompted the king to sanction a procedure to deal with captured ships.34 Lower down the social ladder, shipmasters also appear as
a noble (6s 8d) for two horses; Foedera, 3/i, 412. 31 Hewitt, Organization, 89, note; Runyan, “Ships and Mariners,” 11-3; R. G. Marsden, “Early Prize Jurisdiction and Prize Law in England,” English Historical Review 24 (1909): 675-97. 32 For this and the following, see Rot. Parl., 3: 120, 278, 296, 444; 5: 504; 6: 437; Given-Wilson, ed., “Parliament of November 1381,” PROME, item 107; Given-Wilson, ed., “Parliament of November 1390,” PROME, item 11; idem, “Parliament of November 1391,” PROME, item 50; Given-Wilson, ed., “Parliament of October 1399,” PROME, item 152; R. E. Horrox, ed., “Parliament of April 1463,” PROME, item 18; Horrox, ed., “Parliament of January 1489,” PROME, item 39; A. Luders et al., eds., Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (London: Record Commission, 1810-28), II, 534-5. 33 The continual stream of petitions to outlaw deodand, which met with some initial success, is particularly noteworthy; see Rot. Parl., 2: 345-6, 372-3; 3: 444, 94, 120; 4: 12, 492; Ormrod, ed., “Parliament of April 1376,” PROME, item 133; Ormrod, ed., “Parliament of January 1377,” PROME, item 73; Given-Wilson, ed., “Parliament of November 1380,” PROME, item 33; Given-Wilson, ed., “Parliament of November 1381,” PROME, item 107; Given-Wilson, ed., “Parliament of October 1399,” PROME, item 153; GivenWilson, ed., “Parliament of May 1413,” PROME, item 35; Anne Curry, ed., “Parliament of October 1435,” PROME, item, 26. 34 Rot. Parl., 5: 27, 29, 52-3, 55; Curry, ed., “Parliament of November 1439,” PROME, items 44, 52; Curry, ed., “Parliament of January 1442,” PROME, items 18, 26.
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petitioners, successfully protesting the delay of wages when pressed into naval service and the seizure of ships for minor customs infractions, although the king would not promise to compensate them for all the ship’s equipment that might be damaged during naval service.35 Common mariners also reaped benefits, including bonuses (called ‘regards’) of 6d per week which was added to their regular pay of 3d per day.36 Port towns also began to receive some relief from the burdensome costs of ship impressments. The Crown, for example, began to group seaports together administratively so that they shared the expense of providing ships and men.37 The costs of strengthening seaward defenses were defrayed by murage grants, while port towns were regularly being released from contributing to ‘land service’ by the early fourteenth century.38 To compensate for the cost of outfitting and victualling ships for naval service, port towns were also specifically exempted from subsidies and other taxes.39 By the 1370s, towns that had built barges for the navy were allowed confirmation of their franchises free of charge.40 In exchange for particularly meritorious 35 Rot. Parl. 2: 287, 319-20; Ormrod, ed., “Parliament of January 1365,” PROME, item 26; Ormrod, ed., “Parliament of November 1373,” PROME, items 28. 29. 36 This bonus was recorded in naval accounts from 1387 through at least 1450; see, for example, PRO, E101/40/36, 41/33, 48/15, 53/12, 53/25, 54/4, m. 2, 54/10. Mariners on trading vessels, in contrast, were paid by the voyage; see Travers Twiss, ed., Monumenta Juridica: The Black Book of the Admiralty (London: Rolls Series, no. 55, 1871), 1: 138-42; and Maryanne Kowaleski, “Working at Sea: Maritime Recruitment and Remuneration in Medieval England,” in Simonetta Cavaciocchi, ed., Ricchezza del mare. Richezza dal mare, secc. XIII-XVIII: atti della “trentasettima Settimana di studi”, 11-15 aprile 2005, Istituto internazionale di storia economica F. Datini, Prato, serie 2, Atti delle Settimane di studi e altri convegni, 37 (Florence: Le Monnier, forthcoming). 37 For example, PRO, C47/22/9135; CCR 1377-81, 33, 51, 182; 1399-1402, 238-40. 38 Hilary L. Turner, Town Defences in England and Wales: An Architectural and Documentary Study AD 900-1500 (London: John Baker, 1970); D. Macpherson et al., Rotuli Scotiae in Turri Londinensi et in domo Capitulari Wesmonasteriensi asservati, 19 Edward I-Henry VIII, 2 vols. (London: Record Commission, 18141819), 1: 211; Rot. Parl., 1: 405; 2:, 172; Ormrod, ed., “Parliament of January 1348, “ PROME, item 59; CPR 1413-16, 57. 39 For example, CPR 1288-96, 497-8; 1296-1302, 26; PRO, C47/2/63/2, 7. See also Rodger, Safeguard, 123. 40 Rot Parl., 3: 17, 42, 44; G. H. Martin, ed., “Parliament of October 1377,” PROME, item 52; Martin, ed., “Parliament of October 1378,” PROME, items 38, 39, 52.
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service, some seaports received entirely new privileges. Dartmouth, for example, was granted freedom from tolls throughout the realm in 1337, and a charter of liberties—including the right to elect a mayor—in 1341 in consideration of “the great expense and loss they have suffered by reason of the war” and also for providing two large war ships with a double crew for the king.41 In 1390, Dartmouth was given a monopoly on the export of tin for three years because it “above other places in the realm has long been and still is strong in shipping, and therewith has wrought great havoc on the king’s enemies.”42 In 1393, tiny Dartmouth was granted its own coroner and in 1463 the borough was allowed to absorb its suburb, Southtown, to help citizens guard against enemy incursions. Dartmouth’s neighbor to the south, Plymouth, also benefited from its naval contributions, being named in 1384 as one of the places where passports to depart the realm were available and in 1389 as one of two seaports sanctioned for the departure of pilgrims to Santiago de Compostella.43 Nor did Plymouth hesitate to remind the king of its wartime services to him, as the town did in a successful petition against a corrupt royal customs official in 1396.44 The culmination of Plymouth’s rewards came in 1439, when it received a charter granting it self-government after a long struggle with the town’s manorial lord, Plympton Priory.45 Not so long afterwards, Plymouth was also incorporated, the first town in Devon to do so.
41
Calendar of Charter Rolls, 6 vols. (London: H.M.S.O., 1903-27), 1327-41, 389; 1341-1417, 3-4, 338-9. 42 See for this and the following: CPR 1388-92, 338; CPR 1461-67, 307; Hugh R. Watkin, ed., Dartmouth (Devonshire Association Parochial Histories of Devonshire, no. 5, 1935), 82, 155. The tin monopoly was annulled in 1391 as inconvenient for merchants; Rot. Parl., 3: 295-6; Given-Wilson, ed., “Parliament of November 1391,” PROME, item 48. 43 Statutes of the Realm, 2: 68; Rot. Parl., 3: 120, 275; Given-Wilson, ed., “Parliament of November 1381,” item 107; Given-Wilson, ed., “Parliament of January 1390, Appendix,” no. 18; Crispin Gill, Plymouth: A New History (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1966), 83-4, 92-7. 44 PRO, E159/172, Hilary recorda, m. 5. 45 For this and the following, see Rot. Parl., 3: 662-3; 5: 9, 18-22, 555-61; Given-Wilson, ed., “Parliament of November 1411,” PROME, item 40; Curry, ed., “Parliament of November 1439,” PROME, items 20, 32; Horrox, ed., “Parliament of April 1463,” PROME, item 48. See also C. E. Welch, Plymouth City Charters 1439-1935: A Catalogue (Plymouth: Plymouth City Council, 1962), 5-16, 37-9; CPR 1461-67, 309-10.
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The advantages that accrued to Dartmouth and Plymouth in the fourteenth century were due mostly to their naval contributions, but their ability to meet these obligations arose in large part from deliberate Crown patronage. Shortly before the Hundred Years War began, the Crown had completed a process begun decades earlier to consolidate control over the two fine, deep harbors of Dartmouth Water and Sutton Pool in Plymouth.46 In 1337, the Crown transferred its rights over these two strategic harbors to the newly-created Duchy of Cornwall, which also controlled Fowey Water, which lies at the mouth of the river leading up to the administrative capital of the Duchy, Lostwithiel. Thus the Duchy of Cornwall, led by the Black Prince and closely linked to the Crown, came to control three choice harbors on the southwestern coast. Crown patronage, as well as the location of these harbors on the best shipping lanes to Gascony and Iberia, where English commercial and military interests were expanding at this time, clearly encouraged the use of these ports as embarkation points for troops and supplies, pilgrims, and wine fleets. Other western ports also benefited from royal investment in the navy during the fifteenth century, chief among them Portsmouth, where the Crown spent large sums on seawards fortification, dry docks, and repair facilities, and Southampton, where royal investment in shipbuilding and storehouses is well-known.47 Crown patronage of these western ports was, I argue, a crucial trigger that helped to stimulate their shipping and maritime economies. One reflection of this stimulus was the progressively larger share of shipping these western ports were able to provide. This vitality in the region’s shipping sector was evident, first of all, in its contributions to naval impressments, which rose from just under 40 per cent of English ships at the beginning of the War to 54 per cent by the end of the War (Table 1). Indeed, Dartmouth alone provided more ships for the war effort than any other single port in England, a remarkable achievement when we consider that it ranked around
46
For this and the following, see Gill, Plymouth, 65-7, 72-5; Maryanne Kowaleski, “Introduction,” The Haveners’ Accounts of the Earldom and Duchy of Cornwall, 1287-1356 (Devon and Cornwall Record Society, n.s., vol. 44, 2001), 5-11. 47 A. Temple Patterson, Portsmouth: A History (Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press, 1976), 26-30; Laughton, “Maritime History,” 364-73; Rose, ed., Navy of the Lancastrian King; Carpenter Turner, “Southampton as a Naval Centre,” 39-47.
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88th in total wealth in 1334 and its population in 1377 was only about 1200. The Crown’s recognition of the westwards expansion of shipping is also evident in the regional distribution of the orders it placed for the construction of barges and balingers for naval service; in 1294, only 24 per cent of the 21 barges ordered were from the western port towns, but by 1401, fully half of the 54 orders were directed towards these ports.48 There was a similar rise in the western ports’ visibility on the valuable wine route to Bordeaux, where their share of British shipping rose from around 45 to 73 per cent between the early fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries. Ships from the western ports were also responsible for almost 70 per cent of the late medieval pilgrim transports to St James of Compostela. And studies by Dorothy Burwash indicate that by the fifteenth century, the western ports were capturing a larger share of overseas trade and competed more successfully against foreign carriers than did vessels of the eastern ports.49 How were the western ports able to increase so substantially their share of the nation’s shipping? The Crown’s constant need for ships, particularly its orders for port towns to construct barges at their own cost for naval service, may well have stimulated shipbuilding in these counties.50 Devon’s reputation for shipbuilding was certainly well known.51 And the fact that more barges and balingers (oared sailing 48
Foedera, 4: 28; CCR 1377-81, 32-3, 43-4, 46-7, 51-2, 55, 57, 114, 120, 181-2; CCR 1399-1402, 238-40. See also Rodger, Safeguard, 474, and above, n.16. Note that probably fewer than eight of the 20 ordered in 1294 were built, and probably none of those ordered in 1401 were ever constructed. 49 Dorothy Burwash, English Merchant Shipping 1460-1540 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1947), 145-64. There is some evidence, however, that the shipping and trade of the smaller ports of Norfolk and Suffolk fared better than the larger head ports of eastern England; see Geoffrey V. Scammel, “English Merchant Shipping at the End of the Middle Ages: Some East Coast Evidence,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, 13 (1961): 327-41; N. J. Williams, The Maritime Trade of the East Anglian Ports 1550-1590 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 50 From the 1350s through 1380s, Exeter, Dartmouth, and Plymouth all funded the building of new barges or the fortifying of old ships in response to the government’s needs; see CPR 1350-54, 386; 1354-8, 221; 1377-81, 298; 1385-89, 428; PRO E101/41/2; PRO E101/555/8; M. C. B. Dawes, ed., Register of Edward the Black Prince (London: H.M.S.O., 1931), Part II, 150; Gill, Plymouth, 80; D.R.O., Exeter City Archives, Misc. Roll 6, mm. 17, 25-28 (work on the Exeter barge). 51 PRO E101/555/8; CPR 1350-4, 386; Barbara W. J. Carpenter-Turner, “The Building of the Gracedieu, Valentine and Falconer at Southampton,
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vessels whose speed and maneuverability made them particularly desirable during wartime) were active in western ports, especially Dartmouth, also suggests that West Country shipping was sparked in part by Crown needs during the Hundred Years War.52 Indeed, it must be significant that three new types of boats—the crayer, a small craft with comparatively elaborate sail; spinace, another oared but also decked sailing vessel; and carvels, speedy and highly maneuverable vessels that may have been influenced by the Portuguese caravel—were also found in significantly greater numbers in the western than eastern ports in the late fifteenth century, suggesting a trend of innovation that may originally have been fostered a hundred years earlier.53 Funding for these ships came from a variety of sources, including first and foremost, commercial freightage. During the period of the Hundred Years War, the mercantile shipping capacity of the western ports, particularly those of Dartmouth and Plymouth was clearly growing relative to capacity in eastern ports, as indicated both by the rise of the western ports’ share of the important carrying trade of Bordeaux wine and by their significantly greater profile in the transport of pilgrims to Compostela (Table 1).54 The passenger trade involved in pilgrim transport was capable of turning a tidy profit since the whole voyage took only three to four weeks and
1416-1420,” Mariner’s Mirror, 40 (1954), 65; Ian Friel, “Devon Shipping from the Middle Ages to c. 1600,” in A New Maritime History of Devon, 74. For two masts and other gear shipped from Dartmouth to Greenwich in 1396, see PRO E122/40/21; for the names of West Country shipwrights who were fined for refusing to go to Southampton to work on the king’s ship, Grace Dieu, see PRO, C47/2/49/14 (7 from Bristol, 11 Cornishmen, and 22 from Devon). There was also considerable shipbuilding in Southampton Water (above, n.44) and Bristol; see J. W. Sherborne, The Port of Bristol in the Middle Ages (Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, Local History Pamphlets, 1965), 17. 52 Burwash, Merchant Shipping, 107-8, 112-5, 190-200; J. W. Sherborne, “English Barges and Balingers of the Late Fourteenth Century,” Mariner’s Mirror, 63 (1977): 109-14. 53 Burwash, Merchant Shipping, 120-3, 125-6, 128-31. Crayers usually carried three masts and set a bonnet on both fore and mainsails. Spinaces were oared and decked sailing vessels. Carvels were light, swift ships (with hulls presumably carvel-built), with three masts, a main, a “musyn” and a “fukke”, each supplied with a yard. The mizen probably carried a lateen sail. 54 On this point, see also Wendy R. Childs, “The Commercial Shipping of South-Western England in the Late 15th Century,” Mariner’s Mirror, 83 (1997): 272-92.
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shipowners could earn about £30 for taking 80 passengers.55 The vigor of the carrying trade in the ports of Devon and Cornwall, which together accounted for almost one-half of all voyages to St James of Compostela from 1390 to 1484 and almost one-half of all wine voyages to England from Bordeaux by the mid fifteenth century is especially notable (Table 1). Also significant as a spur to investment in shipping was the rising prosperity of West Country agriculture and the growth of overseas trade in the region (especially the profitable export of cloth and tin) over the course of the late middle ages—in contrast to the “depression” which hit so many areas of northern, eastern, and southern England.56 Substantial funding may have also come from the spoils of war via privateering and piracy. As C. J. Ford has argued, the Crown increasingly pursued a deliberate policy of licensing shipowners and shipmasters in the early fifteenth century to defend English interests by giving them free reign to attack enemy shipping, a “low cost” solution to the king’s dilemma on how to fund a viable navy. Devon and Cornish men took such a leading role in privateering57 that the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, a 1436 tract arguing for the economic and political advantages that England could accrue by exercising control of the seas, specifically cited Dartmouth, Plymouth and Fowey men for their effective harassment of foreign shipping in the English Channel.58 55 The only recorded charge is in 1473, for a London ship of 320 tons taking 400 pilgrims for 225 marks (£150), indicating a charge of 7s 6d per passenger; see CPR 1476-85, 78. The cost from Plymouth was probably slightly less since the voyage was shorter. For this and the following, see also Childs, “Commercial Shipping.” 56 Kowaleski, “Port Towns of Fourteenth-Century Devon;” Kowaleski, “Port Towns,” 476-87; Maryanne Kowaleski, “The Expansion of the South-western Fisheries in Late Medieval England,” Economic History Review, 53 (2000): 420-54. 57 E.g., Charles Kingsford, “West Country Piracy: The School of English Seamen,” in Prejudice and Promise in Fifteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), 78-106, 177-203; Stephen P. Pistono, “Henry IV and the English Privateers,” English Historical Review 90 (1975): 322-30; Stephen P. Pistono, “Henry IV and John Hawley, Privateer, 1399-1408,” Transactions of the Devonshire Association 110 (1979): 145-63; Ford, “Piracy or Policy.” The point of disagreement usually revolves around the degree of control the government could exercise over lawlessness at sea. Kingsford and others emphasize the Crown’s helplessness, while Ford and to some extent, Pistono, view periods of rampant “piracy” as government policy to weaken the French. 58 George Warner, ed., Libelle of Englyshe Polycye: A Poem on the Use of Sea-
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An early example of the profitable merger of interests in naval service, the carrying trade, privateering, and piracy was William Smale, a Dartmouth merchant/shipowner active from the 1330s. Mayor in 1346, he was also personally involved in naval service, both as a shipowner whose vessels were impressed for service, and in his capacity as lieutenant of Lord Guy de Brien, admiral of the West, on whose behalf he assembled fifteen Devon and Cornish ships (seven from Dartmouth) for the king in 1360. A truce intervened, however, and without the means to pay the crew or the costs of the squadron, they were diverted into piracy and profited from the capture of Flemish cargoes worth over £2000. Smale was also accused of plundering a ship in Dartmouth harbor in 1343, and several years later two of his ships were part of a private squadron of 13 vessels that pirated a Spanish ship, threw its mariners into the sea and absconded with the ship and its rich cargo of wine and other goods.59 An even more notorious example is John Hawley of Dartmouth, who in 1379 was commissioned, with two fellow burgesses, to set out with a fleet of seven vessels against the King’s enemies for a period of one year.60 Although accused of irregularities on many occasions, Hawley prospered as the owner of no fewer than 15 ships, serving as mayor of Dartmouth fourteen times, holding various royal appointments in Devon, and acquiring immense amounts of real estate in the Southwest. Often thought to be the model for Chaucer’s Shipman, Hawley’s activities made him tremendously wealthy; he had no difficulty, for instance, in paying £500 cash up front to farm the customs of tonnage and poundage in the whole country.
power, 1436 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 12. Their effectiveness can also be seen in the petitions of their victims; see Dorothy Gardiner, ed., A Calendar of Early Chancery Proceedings Relating to West Country Shipping 1388-1493 (Devon and Cornwall Record Society, n.s., vol. 21, 1976). 59 CCR 1343-6, 115; CCR 1360-4, 4, 22, 27, 120; CPR 1343-45, 100-1; CPR 1358-61, 584-5; CIM, III, 150-1; Watkin, Dartmouth, 183, 271; D.R.O., Exeter Port Customs Accounts, 1349/50-1360/1; Dawes, ed., Register of the Black Prince, 2: 84, 87, 106, 111-12, 121, 141. 60 For this and the following, see Dorothy A. Gardiner, “John Hawley of Dartmouth,” Transactions of the Devonshire Association 98 (1966): 173-205, Michael Jones, “Roches contre Hawley: la cour anglaise de chevalerie et un cas de piraterie à Brest, 1386-1402, “ Mémoires de la société d’histoire et de l’archéologie de Bretagne, 64 (1987): 53-64 ; Pistono, “Hawley;” PRO, C47/6/4; and the relevant documents in Watkin, ed., Dartmouth.
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By the fifteenth century, the significant profits to be gained from privateering and plunder encouraged the emergence of a more organized and businesslike approach to these activities.61 In 1449, a privateering squadron led by Robert Wennington of Dartmouth captured over 100 ships in the Hanseatic salt fleet.62 Prominent gentry from such West Country families as the Trevelyans, Arundells, Bodrugans, and even the Courtenays (whose head was the earl of Devon) also collected the profits of piracy, as shipowners, investors, and receivers of pirated goods, and under color of their county offices.63 It is surely no coincidence, moreover, that the vessels most often associated with piracy— carvels in particular, but also barges and balingers, because of their speed and maneuverability—were concentrated in the West Country ports.64 And it was the ports where the shipping trade had developed most precociously—Fowey, Dartmouth, and Poole in particular—that were at the forefront of the privateering and piracy that was so prevalent in the late medieval ports of western England. From Fowey come Cornish privateerpirates such Mark and John Mixtow, whose targets included a Genoese carrack off the coast of Portugal; John brought the ship and its rich cargo back to Fowey, cavalierly putting its crew ashore in Portugal destitute.65 From Poole comes the notorious Henry Pay, whose 61
Gardiner (West Country Shipping, xvi-xvii) cites evidence on this point; see also J. C. Appleby, “Devon Privateering from Early Times to 1688,” in A New Maritime History of Devon, 90-2. 62 For an account of the capture, see A. R. Myers, ed., English Historical Documents, vol. IV, 1327-1485 (London: Eyre & Spotiswoode, 1969), 259. 63 Kingsford, “West Country Piracy;” A. L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall: Portrait of a Society (London, 1941; reprint Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1990), 75-6; A. L. Rowse, “The Turbulent Career of Sir Henry Bodrugan,” in The Little Land of Cornwall (Gloucester, 1986; reprint, Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1992), 178-90; J. A. F. Thomson, “The Courtenay Family in the Yorkist Period,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 45 (1972): 233. 64 Burwash, Merchant Shipping, 120-3, 125-6, 128-31. Balingers and barges were associated with ports like Dartmouth from the fourteenth century on; carvels appear in the mid-fifteenth century. See also Rodger, Safeguard, 523, n.56 who cites a M. Litt. study of piracy 1450-1500 that found that 60% of known English pirates were barges or balingers. 65 John Keast, The Storey of Fowey (1950; reprint Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1987), 24-33; and Kingsford, “West Country Piracy,” passim. Others profited from the ransoms they collected, which led to a lively trade in prisoners in several West Country ports; see for example, D.R.O., Exeter Mayor’s Court Rolls, 1404/5, mm. 23d, 28d; CIM, vol. 7, 313; see also Kowaleski, “Port Towns,” 491.
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raids on Flanders, Normandy, Brittany, and Castile drew the attention of Spanish chroniclers.66 Although Smale, Hawley, the Mixtows, and Pay as ship captains benefited most from these illegal and semi-legal activities at sea, their crews were also entitled to a share of the profits, an incentive that must have drawn a wide variety of port-town residents into this shady but profitable maritime world.67 Although it would be foolish to deny the very real damage that shipping and port towns suffered during the Hundred Years War, I hope this essay illustrates that it is worth considering the ways that the War stimulated investment in shipbuilding, in town defenses and quayside facilities, and in the training and employment of a whole range of maritime workers, from shipwrights and ropers to mariners and masters. We also need to consider the sheer amount of cash that the war effort siphoned to port towns; between 1368 and 1381, for instance, naval costs accounted for over £246,050, or 23 per cent of the total spending on war.68 Edward III’s campaign to the Low Countries in 1338 included wage payments of almost £5,000 to 12,263 maritime workers (of whom 11,325 were mariners) in 370 ships, most of which were in service for just under one month.69 In other words, the central government was transferring more money to port towns than it was taking away in the form of taxes. Less quantifiable is the impact of the increasingly favorable distribution of prize money, which reduced the royal share of captured cargoes and ships to virtually nothing by the fifteenth century, when shipowners customarily received one-third, shipmasters one-sixth, and the crews half of the spoils.70 Few accounts survive of the legitimate distribution of these profits, but the proceedings of inquisitions into
66
H. P. Smith, The History of the Borough and County of the Town of Poole, 2 vols. (Poole: Looker, 1951), 1: 178-82; F. W. Matthews, “Henry Pay: The Story of a Noted Poole Worthy,” Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 61 (1939): 89-93; Kingsford, “West Country Piracy,” 82-3. 67 For the variety of occupational backgrounds practiced by the mariners aboard ships of John Hawley accused of piracy, see Kowaleski, “Working at Sea.” 68 Sherborne, “Costs of English Warfare,” 149. See also Sherborne, “English Navy: Shipping and Manpower.” 69 Lyon, “Infrastructure,” 66-7. 70 D. A. Gardiner, "The History of Belligerent Rights on the High Seas in the Fourteenth Century," Law Quarterly Review 48 (1932): 521-46; Marsden, “Early Prize Jurisdiction;” Richmond, “Keeping of the Seas,” 121; Rodger, Safeguard, 127.
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illegal privateering or piracy suggest very large profits indeed, which given the notoriety of the West Country seamen for these activities, must be considered as a significant source of profit and investment.71 Nor must we forget the bigger picture here, because it was the navigational experience and entrepreneurial spirit formed by the naval, privateering, and piratical activities of late medieval English mariners that provided the “school for seamen” and training for Britain’s later voyages of exploration and colonization to the New World.
71
For examples of illegal profits made by Devon pirates and privateers, see Gardiner, ed., Early Chancery Proceedings.
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LAND AND LABOUR
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PEASANT SERVITUDE IN LATER MEDIEVAL PROVENCE: ARCHAISM OR INNOVATION? John Drendel
Peasant servitude lasted only briefly as a generalized phenomenon in Provence. Monastic sources attest to it widely for perhaps a century after 1050. It fossilized in most areas into symbolic dues after 1200, a victim of economic change and the pressures upon lordship created by the reconstruction of centralized authority in Provence. In the later Middle Ages, as sources become more abundant, we encounter mentions of serfdom, in particular an onerous form of lordship, characterized by tenures burdened with heavy charges and restrictions upon inheritance, localized in a swath of villages astride the highlands of Provence. Monique Zerner suggests that this “bondage to land,” rather than being a declining artifact of an earlier age represented a revival of peasant servitude.1 This reassessment comes in the context of a renewed interest in serfdom among French historians, who have recently discovered that serfdom survived in areas where they thought it to have been abolished in the course of the thirteenth century.2 Did serfdom indeed rebound in Provence in the later Middle Ages, and if so, what was its relationship to the economic problems of the period? We should first clarify the vocabulary and language of serfdom. Marc Bloch defined servitude as a personal, hereditary, and shameful attachment to a lord embodied in dues, foremost of which were payment of a tallage and obligatory labor works or corvées, and restric-
1 Monique Zerner, “Le nouveau servage en Provence au XIe-XIIIe siècles: absence ou rareté?” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome 112 (2000): 911-1007. 2 Monique Bourin, ed., La servitude dans les pays de la Méditerranée Occidentale chrétienne au XIIe siècle et au-delà: déclinante ou renouvelée? Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome 112 (2000); the introduction to this volume by Monique Bourin and Paul Freedman is online at http://lamop.univ-paris1.fr/W3/Intro MEFRM2000.pdf; “‘Nouveaux servages’ de l’Europe médiane et septentrionale (XIIIe-XVIe siècles),” Conférence à Göttingen, 6-8 février 2003, reviewed by Julien Demade, Histoire & Sociétés Rurales 19 (2003): 354-9.
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tions upon personal freedom.3 Among the latter, the most important limited the right to possess property and to marry; by virtue of mainmorte, the lord inherited part or all of the real or movable goods of his serfs, while formariage imposed barriers, usually in the form of onerous fines, against marriage among peasants of different lords. In what follows, I use the terms servitude, serfdom and bondage as synonyms referring to dependent status as Bloch defined it; the term “slave” refers to human chattels under Roman law, and of dependents designated as servi in the period prior to 1000; “freeholders” refers to peasants possessed of non-dependent allods, alleutiers in French; the term “real servitude” or “bondage to land” describes an onerous and degrading status in later medieval Provence not unlike serfdom, but with an important difference. This form of dependence was created by the land a peasant held, rather than by inheritance of a personal tie; in theory a peasant who renounced his holdings no longer endured the servitudes they imposed. Sources for the study of dependency in Provence are skewed towards the end of the Middle Ages. Unlike the north of Europe, records of seigneurial administration are not numerous in any period.4 The period between 950 and 1120 is documented by the monastic cartularies of the great Provençal abbeys, St. Victor of Marseille, Lérins, St. Pons, Montmajour and the episcopal cartulary of Apt. Most of these sources peter out before the middle of the twelfth century, leaving a hiatus of a century before the enquêtes of the Angevin counts, beginning in 1252, and notarial and communal records from the countryside allow us to pick up the thread again in the late thirteenth century.5 The lacunae of documentation between
3
Marc Bloch, “Liberté et servitude personelle au Moyen Age, particulièrement en France; contribution à une étude des classes,” in Marc Bloch, Mélanges Historiques (Paris: Sevpen, 1963), 1: 286-91. 4 Georges Duby, “Note sur les corvées dans les Alpes du sud en 1338,” in Pierre Petot, ed., Études d’histoire du droit privé offertes à Pierre Petot (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1959), 141-46. 5 Monique Zerner, “L’Élaboration du grand cartulaire de Saint-Victor de Marseille,” in Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle, and Michel Parisse, eds., Les Cartulaires, Actes de la Table Ronde Organisée par l’École Nationale des Chartes et le G.D.R. 121 du C.N.R.S., Mémoires et Documents de l’École des Chartes (Paris: École des Chartes, 1993), 217-46; Robert-Henri Bautier and Janine Sornay, Les sources de l’histoire économique et sociale du Moyen Âge: Provence, Comtat Venaissin, Dauphiné, Savoie (Paris: CNRS, 1972-1974).
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1150 and 1250 leave us in the dark concerning the period during which servitude withered, but the records which survived in the period following 1250 describe its remnants and perhaps its sequels. George Duby’s influential thesis on the Mâconnais explained the manifestations of personal servitude as arising from the disappearance of the Roman notion of liberty and private land which the Carolingians sustained until the tenth century.6 The disappearance of public jurisdiction allowed local lords to treat the bodies and lands of free peasants as no different from those of their slaves. Recent historians of the early feudal period in Provence more or less follow this model, despite the discrepancies between Provence and Burgundy.7 In the eighth century, the social landscape of Provence resembled late antiquity more than the region between the Loire and the Rhine. Servi cultivated the Provençal demesnes which Abbo, rector of the Tarentais, bequeathed in his will of 739 to the Abbey of the Novalesa, without assistance from the families of diverse status which held individual properties, colonicae. These Provençal manors at least did not have the bipartite structure of estates in Northern Francia.8 Less than a century later, in 812/13, the Bishop of Marseille’s enumeration of his lands and dependents mentions no freedmen or demesne slaves at all; a roughly equal number of colons and slaves worked on tenures.9 Though some slaves probably worked the lands of the colonicae dominicatus, legal distinctions among peasant were fewer, reflecting a simplified social structure. Beginning in the late tenth century, the economic and social status of these dependents improved. Although Paul-Albert Février believed the impact of the sarrazinades to be wildly exaggerated, Provence did experience considerable domestic warfare and suffered incursions by Islamic raiders in the period 870-972 which may have contributed to breaking the “nexus between peasants and land.”10 6 Georges Duby, La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Paris, 1952; reprint Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1988), 173-262. 7 Jean-Pierre Poly, La Provence et la société féodale 879-1166. Contribution à l’étude des structures dites féodales dans le Midi, Collection “Études” (Paris: Bordas, 1976). 8 Patrick J. Geary, Aristocracy in Provence, The Rhône Basin at the Dawn of the Carolingian Age, The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 88. 9 Poly, La Provence, 92. 10 Paul-Albert Février, “Review of Les Sarrasins dans le Haut Moyen-Âge
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Mentions of mancipia disappear in the latter half of the tenth century; the distinction between free and unfree after 1040. The language of sources refers to peasants with less pejorative language; they are no longer objects, but rather actors in the social landscape.11 Indeed, in this period a group of peasant freeholders briefly emerged, profiting from the reclamation of wasteland, particularly through contracts of medium vestum which gave peasants the ownership of half the land they cleared after a period of five to seven years.12 An opposing social force, the ascendant warrior class of caballarii, beat down the free peasantry. The decline of comital power led to the privatisation of Church lands in the late ninth century, followed by those of the count in the 1040s.13 The result was a new social division between rusticus and caballarii, termed miles after 1050. For Stephen Weinberger, the changing vocabulary was not wholly unfavorable towards the peasants who found their social role valorized, but the end result was the disappearance of freeholding peasants, and the emergence of a broad servitude. From castles held for the count, or built after 1040 on allodial lands, the miles exploited jurisdictional powers of public authority: justice, hospitality (alberga), military service (cavalcata) and somewhat later the assistance (quista) owed by a vassal to his lord. These were the pretexts for the imposition of arbitrary confiscations—malos usos and malas consuetudines— upon the peasantry, and notably the freeholding peasants. Some rich peasants may have escaped upwards into the ranks of the warrior aristocracy but most fell under its domination.14 The characteristics of this servitude are disputed. Monique Zerner, who has closely studied the cartulary of St. Victor for this period, finds within it scarce evidence of peasant servitude. About 40 twelfthFrançais (Histoire et Archéologies) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1965),” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes (1966): 301-3; Stephen Weinberger, “La transformation de la société paysanne en Provence médiévale,” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 45 (1990): 10. 11 Poly, La Provence, 108; Weinberger, “La transformation,”10-12. 12 Weinberger, “La transformation,” 12-13; Monique Zerner, “Sur la croissance agricole en Provence,” in Centre Culturel Départemental de l’Abbaye de Flaran, ed., La croissance agricole du Haut Moyen Âge: Chronologie, modalités, géographie. Flaran (Auch: Centre culturel départemental de l’Abbaye de Flaran, 1990), 153-67. 13 Poly, La Provence, 92 14 Poly, La Provence, 92, 134; Weinberger, “La transformation,” 10-12.
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Louis initiated a general movement towards the abolition of serfdom in the thirteenth century, the decline of millenial serfdom resulted from the decay of seigneurial prerogatives. The allodialisation of seigneurial power in a region with a strong tradition of Roman law resulted in a collective possession of lordship shared among heirs equally in each generation. While such “coseigneuries” were generally managed through a single baile in the thirteenth century and later, the fragmentation of lordship weakened its holders in the face of competition from resurgent comital power.21 The counts of Provence reconquered their ascendancy after the marriage between the count of Barcelona and the heiress of Forqualquier in 1094 brought to Provence a powerful and dynamic Catalan dynasty.22 Raimund Berenger III and his heirs attacked strong lordship by undercutting its social domination. particularly in the highland regions where lords opposed comital power most fiercely. Consular governments, inspired by Italian influence and the renaissance of Roman law, existed in villages of eastern Provence from at least 1064. In the first half of the thirteenth century, Raimund Berenger V used this tradition to weaken highland barons by creating consulates in the towns and villages of highland Provence where they did not exist; in so doing, as we have seen, he abolished serfdom. The Angevin counts of Provence continued this policy in the second half of the thirteenth century by granting “safeguard” (salvatoria) to serfs who left their lord, a status which brought them under the lordship of the count. Those who did so abandoned the lands and goods they held from their personal lord, which suggests that the peasants’ relationship to land was already more powerful than personal bondage.23 The fading of servitude parallels the disappearance of traditional peasant census tenure in favor of the Roman law contract of emphyteusis. In the thirteenth century, whenever the sisters of La Celle had the occasion to relet or renew a traditional censive holding, they 21
Poly, La Provence, 155-9 Poly, La Provence, 318-58. 23 Jean-Paul Boyer and Alain Venturini, “Les consulats ruraux dans le ressort de l’Évêché de Nice (circa 1150-1326),” Actes des Journées d’Histoire Régionale, Mouans Sartoux (1984): 361-96; Aubenas, “Le servage,” 510 n.2; Édouard Baratier, Enquêtes sur les droits et revenus de Charles Ie d’Anjou en Provence, 1252 et 1278, avec une étude sur le domaine comtal et les seigneuries de Provence au XIIIe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1969), 74-5. 22
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did so using the newer Roman law contract. This evolution was part of the global remodeling and concentration of habitat in Provence, which saw lords divide up seigneurial demesnes constituted during the eleventh century among free peasants and peasants soon to be free. In some instances lords freed their own serfs individually, but more often they accorded franchises to entire villages, even to the point of emulating the counts, and permitting villagers to create permanent institutions of self-governance. Many such acts survive from the thirteenth century. These accords were paid for by converting onerous or shameful services into cash payments.24 The Capetian dynasty of counts which succeeded the Catalans in 1246 launched a series of detailed enquêtes in the 1250s, modeled upon Saint Louis’ administration of Languedoc.25 These surveys, a revived Roman law notariat, and a general renaissance of written records, shed new light upon the status of peasants in the second half of the thirteenth century. These records show, as we noted, that the count tended to dissolve servitude in villages where he was a direct lord. But the counts were not successful in wresting all elements of public authority from the lay and ecclesiastical lords who wielded it. Lords like the viscounts of Marseille limited the count’s jurisdiction in the Val of Trets to the east of Aix; the abbot of Lerins held all rights of justice in Cannes and its neighboring coast; the archbishop of Arles held all rights of justice in Salon; the lands of the sisters of La Celle, south of Brignoles, were exempt from the count’s jurisdiction as well, save for justice over homicide. Still, in the inquest into comital rights conducted in 1252 and 1278, Edouard Baratier found that the count had recovered comital domain over the lands of lay lords, even in the highland regions north of the Var, where baronial families like the Glandèves retained much land and power.26 The servitude which emerges in the records of the later Middle Ages reflects the enduring power of seigneurial jurisdiction in some 24
L’Hermitte-Leclercq, Le monachisme, 87-90; Baratier, Enquêtes, 75. Baratier edited the most important enquêtes from the thirteenth century, but only a few of the many detailed enquêtes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centurys are available in print, Robert-Henri Bautier and Janine Sornay, Les sources de l’histoire économique et sociale du Moyen Âge, 1: 35-53. 26 Baratier, Enquêtes, 143, n.2; 178. John Drendel, “The Institutions of Village Goverment in Later Medieval Provence and the Origins of the Council of Trets,” Historical Reflections/Réflections Historiques 19 (1993): 249-66. 25
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(although by no means all) of the mountain valleys of highland Provence.27 In 1252, in the upper valleys of the Durance, Verdon, and Var rivers, personal dependents of the count outnumbered free peasants in numerous villages. The enquêteurs called these dependents “men of the market quest” (homines de quista ad mercedem). Zerner argues that these men were not serfs, noting that only in one locality, Aups were they distinguished from “free.” According to Zerner “men of the quista” refers to the same comital obligation owed by all the counts subjects. Quista, however, is a term which originated in the eleventh century as one of the malos usos; it continued in the thirteenth century to refer to both seigneurial and comital obligations.28 There is considerable evidence that homines de quista ad mercedem refers to a specific obligation owed by men by virtue of their subordinate status; in 1341, homines de mercedem referred to men in Castellane whose annual tallage was a mark of dependence. Other dependents bore servitude by virtue of their attachment to a specific type of tenure, the casamentum. One can find remnants of mainmorte, corvées and seigneurial quistas scattered across highland Provence from Forqualquier to the valleys north of Grasse.29 Baratier described the servitude of homines de quista and casamenti as comparable with the status of serfs in notarial registers from the
27
Strong communities and a strong count reduced lordship to very little in the upper valley of the Vésubie after 1250, Jean-Paul Boyer, Hommes et communautés du haut pays niçois médiéval. La Vésubie (XIIIe-XVe siècles), preface by Noël Coulet (Nice: Centre d’Études Médiévales de Nice, 1990), 357-83. 28 Baratier, Enquêtes, 129-134; Zerner, “Nouveau servage,” 1004; Poly, La Provence, 134. The lords of the village of Saint Christol on the plateau of Forqualquier continued to levy quistas in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, quistas which in the case of the Abbey of Saint-André were limited by arbitration in 1270 to five cases modeled upon those which circumscribed the quistas of the count. This suggests how broad the quista was beforehand, Danuta Poppe, “Saint-Christol à l’époque médiévale,” Cahiers du Centre d’Études des Sociétés Méditerranéennes 53 (1) (1966): 25-26; the same arbitration conceded to the inhabitants the right to dispose of property by will. In Reillanne, inhabitants paid a seigneurial quista as well, Danuta Poppe, Economie et société d’un bourg provençal au XIVe siècle: Reillanne en Haute Provence, trans. Danuta Poppe, Jan Stodolniak and Lidia Carminati-Nawrocka (Wroclaw: Académie Polonaise des Sciences, Institut d’Histoire de la Culture Matérielle, 1980), 72; Poppe, “Saint-Christol,” 25-26. 29 Aubenas, “Le servage,” 78; Colette Samaran, “Note sur la dépendance personnelle en Haute-Provence au XIVe siècle,” Annales du Midi 69 (1957): 229-36; Baratier, Enquêtes, 102.
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early fourteenth century studied by Colette Samaran.30 These acts reveal in much more detail than the comital records the subjection in the region of Grasse of two classes of men: caslani and maleservi. Maleservi possessed a casamentum, a coherent unit comprised of arable land, dwellings and outbuildings, garden, vineyard and pasture held not in emphyteusis but by virtue of an act of homage. The maleservus had no other rights over the casamentum, other than to hold it and bequeath it to a direct heir. If there was more than one direct heir, the holding could not be divided but only held undivided; in the absence of heirs, the lord recovered the casamentum through mainmorte, though in fact it was often relet to close relatives or other members of the village.31 These obligations are very like those owed in this period by peasants in the Alps of Savoy and Dauphiné to the north.32 The maleservus owed a heavy dues, up to 4 sesters and 3 quarters of grain after the harvest. Caslani in the village of Caussols had no more freedom to buy and sell their land than maleservi, but elsewhere they appeared to possess land in emphyteusis. Caslani and casamenti alike owed their lord tallage in six customary cases, the obligation to inhabit the village and use the lords oven and mill, the burden of comital taxation, and corvées. For casamenti, this form of servitude derived from the status of land and was not personal; the free peasant who acquired a casamentum acquired a personal tie to the lord, and in theory, could release himself from that same bondage by relinquishing his holding.33 It is comparable to the servitude of men known as maleservi in Castellane in 1341, whose goods were subject to mainmorte unless their children held the land undivided. It is also similar to the bondage of peasants described in a comital inquest in the region of Puget-Theniers, where lords inherited the goods of many villagers.34 Although the language differs 30
Samaran, “Note sur la dépendance,” 229-36. Samaran, “Note sur la dépendance,” 230-32. 32 Henri Falque-Vert, Les hommes et la montagne en Dauphiné au XIIIe siècle, Collection “La Pierre et l’Écrit” (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1997); Nicolas Carrier, La vie montagnarde en Faucigny à la fin du Moyen Âge. Économie et société, fin XIIIe-début XVIe siècle, Collection Logiques Historiques (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001); Fabrice Mouthon, “La famille et la terre: exploitations paysannes au sud du Léman à la fin du XIIIe siècle,” Revue Historique 307 (2002): 891-937. 33 Samaran, “Note sur la dépendance,” 232. 34 Aubenas, “Le servage,” 78. The document from Puget-Theniers will be discussed below. 31
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from place to place, and the details as well, the prevalent form of servitude in these highlands appears to have been real, and not personal. The rise of bondage to land underlies the paradox of Zerner’s final conclusion; personal serfdom had not only disappeared from Provence, it never really had existed, but lords in the mountains used rights over land to capture economic resources from peasants beginning in the late twelfth century, as their jurisdictional rights decayed.35 The distinction is neat, but it overlooks the clear, albeit scanty, evidence of personal servitude based upon jurisdictional rights prior to 1150, and its fossilized remnants later. The apparent rise of bondage to land may be a simple reflection of more abundant sources after 1250. Moreover, as George Duby pointed out long ago, a dependent peasantry in Provence made no sense to lords moving towards salaried agricultural labor in the monetized economy of the early fourteenth century.36 Finally, the idea that lords would use rights over property to limit the freedom of peasants and extract greater rent goes against the grain of an agrarian legal system dominated by Roman Law, and in particular by emphyteutic tenure. Emphyteusis was a flexible contract adaptable to very different relations of power between peasants and lords, but it conferred fundamental rights of possession incompatible with seigneurial restrictions on inheritance and alienation.37 35
Zerner, “Nouveau servage,” 1005-7. Duby, “Note,” 144. 37 The question of the impact of Roman law upon freedom merits a separate discussion. Aubenas argued that the clarity of Roman law laminated a diversity of social statuses into a stark opposition between free and unfree, much as English common law polarized the status of villani in opposition to free men, but Gouron disagrees, pointing out that civil law commentators had little interest in the status of peasants in the twelfth century, and that the broader impact of their interpretation of the law uniformly promoted the Roman law notion of liberty. The consensual essence of Roman law contracts renders the legal system unusable in an unfree society. The rapid, precocious and widespread diffusion of Roman law and the notariat in the Provençal countryside widely promoted emphiteusis tenure and credit, whose close relationship I have explored elsewhere, Roger Aubenas, “Inconscience de juristes ou pédantisme malfaisant? Un chapitre d’histoire juridico-sociale, XIe-XVe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire de Droit 56 (1978): 215-52, cited by André Gouron, “Liberté, servage et glossateurs,” Recueil des mémoires et travaux publié par la Société d’Histoire du droit et des institution des anciens pays de droit écrit (1980): 41-51, reprinted in La science du droit dans le Midi de la France au Moyen Âge (London: Variorum, 1980), XVI-XXVI; John Drendel, “Le crédit 36
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The economic illogic of bondage to land for both lords and peasants in the fourteenth century emerges most clearly in a source from the later Middle Ages which has not been examined from this perspective, an enquête which the auditors of Provence’s central accounting office ordered into declining tax revenues in the mountain baillie of Puget-Theniers in the spring of 1343.38 The Chamber of Accounts in Aix ordered local officers to investigate the missing foci or basic taxpaying unit in 25 villages and 4 small towns. In each community the officers empaneled jurors who identified the hearths, named the missing tax payers, described the time and cause of their departure, and their present residence, if known. The investigation documents a dramatic population loss of one-third of the region’s population in the space of a dozen years, a drop affecting nearly every village. This source has been interpreted as evidence of a Malthusian crisis in Provence; however, Edouard Baratier declined to invoke overpopulation, speaking rather of “serious economic difficulties” which neither he nor his student Ilona Jonas explored. The collapse in population is unequalled in any other region of Provence, with the exception of a few villages, also in highland Provence, affected by the introduction of outside flocks onto common pastures.39 The inhabitants of some villages decried poor weather and sterilitas as the fundamental causes of the region’s malaise, and indeed sources do mention regional climatic crises and food shortages in
dans les archives notariales en Basse-Provence au début du XIVe siècle,” in François Menant and Odile Redon, eds., Notaires et crédit dans l’occident méditerranéen médiéval, Collection de l’École Française de Rome (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2004); Marie Louise Carlin, La pénétration du droit romain dans les Actes de la Pratique Provençale (11e-13e siècle), Bibliothèque d’histoire du droit et droit romain (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1967); Paul-Louis Malaussena, La vie en Provence orientale aux XIVe et XVe siècles, introd. by Roger Aubenas (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1969). 38 Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, B354. Édouard Baratier discovered this source, and his student Ilona Jonas studied it in a fine article which I have relied upon, along with the original document, to write the following passages, Édouard Baratier, La démographie provençale du XIIIe au XVIe siècle, avec chiffres de comparaison pour le XVIIIe siècle, Démographie et Sociétés (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1961), 80, 223-4; Ilona Jonas, “Note sur un recours de feux dans la baillie de Puget-Théniers en 1343,” Provence Historique 27 (1977): 59-80. 39 Baratier, La démographie, 80.
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Southern France in 1329-1330, 1331-1332, and 1339-1340.40 Other jurors fingered debt, which harvest failures may well have provoked. Yet no region of Provence outside of Puget-Theniers appears to have suffered social and economic dislocation on this scale as a result of food shortages, climatic incidents, or debt; my own study of a neighboring region suggests that highlands village sustained a relative degree of prosperity through the first four decades of the fourteenth century, a prosperity brought down not by crop failure or overpopulation by rather by a crushing burden of war taxation.41 What is specific to Puget-Theniers, apart from the catastrophic loss of population, was the high population of dependent peasants: 24 per cent of 226 peasants hearths deserted by death escheated to the lord, while only 9.6 per cent were in the hands of heirs, a figure reflecting not the lack of legitimate offspring but rather their emigration. The nature of the tie between lord and peasant is expressed by the term “man of” (suus homo erat) or the remark that the goods escheated to the lord pro servicio. On a few occasions the term homo de casamento is expressly mentioned, but in any case, the difference between the percentage of homes and properties sold (12 per cent) and recovered by creditors (16 per cent) as opposed to those claimed by the lord is convincing evidence of the servile incapacity of a substantial proportion the households to sell their goods, bequeath them to heirs or use them as collateral for loans.42 The enquête of 1343 is unclear concerning the specific nature of servitude in Puget-Theniers, but eloquent in its description of its economic impact. Whereas elsewhere in Provence, the transition from feudal tenure to emphyteusis gave peasants rights which accelerated the liquidity of land, creating a land market, and above all, a market for credit, in these highland villages, lack of freedom singularly restricted the ability of peasants to mobilize capital. Credit existed— the jurors specified many peasants who had lost their goods to creditors—but without the collateral of land, peasants borrowing would have restricted what few precious movables they could pledge. Indeed it is difficult to understand how the lords themselves might 40 Louis Stouff, Ravitaillement et alimentation en Provence aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Mouton, 1970), 284; Marie-Joseph Laurénaudie, “Les famines en Languedoc au XIVe et XVe siècles,” Annales du Midi 64 (1952): 23-35. 41 John Drendel, “Jews, Villagers and the Count in Haute Provence: Marginality and Mediation,” Provence Historique 49 (1999): 217-31. 42 Jonas, “Note sur un recours,” 72-4, 80.
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BARGAINING POWER AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: SEVEN CENTURIES OF ITALIAN SHARECROPPING CONTRACTS, 821 TO 1517 A.D. Francesco L. Galassi I A fundamental division lies at the heart of what has been called the New Institutional Economics (NIE). To stylize a complex debate, on the one hand the “functionalist” view, put forth for example by North and Thomas or Sugden,1 argues that the multiplicity of stable equilibria leads to the establishment of competing selfreinforcing conventions. Institutional choice and change occur as the most successful conventions, usually defined as the least costly ones, emerge. On the other side, which for want of a better term could be called the “QWERTY view” after David’s influential article,2 multiple stable equilibria lead to arbitrary or stochastic selection through “sensitive dependence” on small events (path dependence). Increasing returns, network economies, or sheer uncertainty over the precise outcomes of alternative arrangements then generate rents or quasi rents for a subset of actors, who will find it advantageous to invest resources in protecting and enforcing existing institutions. No guarantee of efficiency or even reversibility exists.3 As always when worldviews differ, proponents of either approach can point to a mismatch between the opposing model and everyday observation. Change undeniably takes place, and it would take a 1
D. C. North and R. Thomas, The Rise of the Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); R. Sugden, “Spontaneous Order,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 3 (4) (1989): 85-97; R. Sugden, “Convention, Creativity and Conflict,” in Y. Varoufakis and D. Young, eds., Conflict in Economics (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 68-90; R. Sugden, “Rational Choice: A Survey of Contributions from Economics and Philosophy,” Economic Journal 101 (4) (1991): 751-85. 2 P. David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 75 (2) (1985): 332-7. 3 D. C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
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particularly obdurate mind to deny that historically the broad thrust of institutional change has been towards increasing efficiency and reducing transaction costs, albeit with checks and reversals, at times on a macro scale. At the same time, however, the world is not a Panglossian equilibrium where all is at its best. To detached inspection, the functionalist approach has more than a whiff of teleology or at the very least bears a strong resemblance to the smoothness of an Arrow-Debreu setting, as Knight pointed out.4 The root of this division probably lies in the conceptual difficulty of modeling change in social relations.5 To be more specific, the disagreement does not ultimately hinge on the sources of social change, in that both approaches can deal with randomness or intentionality, determinism and free will, or any mixture of these. The difficulty lies rather in the process of transmission: how does a mutation, however it may have arisen, become a new norm? How does it “reproduce”? The biological analogy is both troublesome and insightful. Troublesome because it brings back Alchian’s concept of “fitness,”6 so that it becomes necessary yet again to separate success from optimality. But the insight into the tension running through the whole body of NIE-inspired literature may well be worth the small price of underscoring that distinction.7 If seen from the perspective of the numerous attempts to apply evolutionary thinking to economics,8 the difficulty may be reduced to what Vromen9 has argued is the real puzzle in that exercise: arriving at a satisfactory specification of the transmission mechanism. In fact, of the three constituent elements of evolution—mutation, selection, and transmission—this last aspect remains the most troublesome for social science.10 If transmission is unclear selection cannot be understood 4 J. Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 5 M. S. Archer, Culture and Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 6 A. A. Alchian, “Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic Theory,” Journal of Political Economy 58 (1950): 211-22. 7 E. Sober, The Nature of Selection (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984). 8 For review see G. M. Hodgson, Economics and Evolution (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). 9 J. J. Vromen, Economic Evolution (London: Routledge, 1995). 10 M. T. Hannan and J. Freeman, Organizing Ecology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
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either, in that the units on which selective pressures act have to be identified before the process of selecting can be mapped. NIE does not have a general answer to this puzzle, so that unsurprisingly the evolutionary analysis of institutions has been focusing on case studies.11 One important proposal in this direction was put forth by Nelson and Winter.12 The unit of selection is, in their framework, the individual “routine” used in any given economic process, whether consciously put in place or slowly arrived at by random walk or learning by doing. Since routines can be learned, this makes economic evolution Lamarckian (transmission of acquired traits) rather than Darwinian (only genotypes are capable of replication, and change occurs through their differential survival rates). However, if these routines are to be considered the economic equivalent of genes how they replicate is not clear. A gene can be isolated as a unit of information within a biological organism, while a “routine” is not similarly identifiable. The suggestion that there are “units of culture” (memes),13 though fascinating is difficult to test and use analytically. The problem can therefore be put in these terms: reconciling the functionalist vs. path-dependence debate involves specifying an agreed (set of) evolutionary mechanism(s). That in turn depends on defining what is being selected. If a basic (set of) unit(s) can be agreed upon, then we could watch economic evolution in action and study the selection process. As a first approximation, then, it should be possible to identify an institution and isolate within it a set of rules whose incidence in the population changes over time, recognizing that to reach meaningful conclusions the time horizon might have to be longer than most studies of institutional change allow. We could then correlate these changes with potential transmission links. To achieve this, we need a well-defined population with a clearly identifiable set of characteristics, in an environment whose broad features are reasonably well known. The population needs to be, first, successful, that is reproduce over long periods of 11 L. J. Alston, T. Eggertsson, and D. C. North, Empirical Studies in Institutional Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 12 R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1982). 13 R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); S. Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
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time, and second, changing yet reasonably stable (does not undergo such profound modifications that descendants cease altogether to resemble ancestors). We need, in fact, something akin to Darwin’s Galápagos finches.14 On a much more modest level, in this paper I propose to look at just one such population.
II In early June 821 A.D., in a village called Baiano, some fifty kilometres south-east of Siena (central Italy), a farmer named Leuprandus leased from the Abbey of San Salvatore a farm “with a house [...] vines, woods, streams and pasture, tilled and untilled land” for which he agreed to pay the Abbey “omnia medietate,” half of all [products]. The agreement, the earliest known sharecropping agreement in Italy and one of the earliest surviving farm contracts anywhere, was simplicity itself: in a few lines, beside the land and the house, the Abbey agreed to supply oxen and half the seed while Leuprandus promised to live on the farm.15 Leuprandus was illiterate, yet he probably would have had no trouble recognising as fundamentally the same agreement as his own a contract in use in Tuscany over 1,000 years later.16 Then too, rent consisted of half of all output and the tenant agreed to live on the farm. Variable inputs were supplied in somewhat different proportions, but what had really changed by the late nineteenth century was the sheer number of stipulations that had been added to that basic agreement over time: the later contract consisted of 4 closely printed pages and 26 distinct clauses. Mezzadria (sharecropping) pre-dated Leuprandus and lasted well into the post-1945 years. At its zenith, in the nineteenth century, in central Italy it accounted for over half (in some areas over 2/3) of all farm employment, and was used in every part of country and 14 P. R. Grant, “Variation in the Size and Shape of Darwin’s Finches,” Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society 25 (1985): 1-39; J. Weiner, The Beak of the Finch. Evolution in Real Time (London: Vintage Books, 1995). 15 P. S. Leicht, “Livellario nomine. Osservazioni ad alcune carte amiatine del sec. IX,” Studi Senesi 1 (1906): 275-301; I. Imberciadori, Mezzadria classica toscana (Florence: Vallecchi, 1951), 78. 16 C. M. Mazzini, La Toscana Agricola. Atti della Giunta per la Inchiesta Agraria e sulle condizioni della classe agricola (Rome: Forzani, 1881), 3, Part 1: 463-466.
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throughout the Mediterranean basin.17 As recently as June 1961, exactly 1,140 years after Leuprandus put his cross on that contract, twelve per cent of all farmland in Italy (some 3.2 million hectares) was sharecropped.18 As economic events go, eleven centuries can be considered longterm success. But success of what? What is the link between Leuprandus and the Italian farm census of 1961? Because it is the evolution of a contract that forms the focus of this inquiry, let us be very clear. I will look at changes brought over time to land rental contracts having the following characteristics: first, rent is paid as a share of the product19 and second, the land is already “improved” and constitutes a farm with a house for the tenant to live in. This excludes emphyteosis or ad meliorandum agreements with share rents. In the remainder of the paper, I will first briefly discuss the adoption and spreading of share contracts in Italy in the late Middle Ages, then will identify three clauses which appear quite early on in the centuries. From June 821 until January 1517 I can then track the geographic spread and frequency of these clauses through a sample of 832 sharecropping contracts, following them through periods of demographic expansion, stagnation and decline. In effect I will treat the early contracts as an initial benchmark against which mutation can be measured. What the inquiry will show is that the spread of mutation to the original “benchmark package” (that is, the transmission) is linked to the channels of communication. The framework within which these changes can be understood is an agency problem. III Though already used in antiquity,20 share contracts became increasingly common in Italy from the thirteenth century onwards.21 17
T. J. Byres, “Historical Perspectives on Sharecropping,” in T. J. Byres, ed., Sharecropping and Sharecroppers (London: Frank Cass., 1983), 1-18. 18 Istituto Centrale di Statistica (ISTAT), Sommario di statistiche storiche 1926-1985 (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1986), 189. 19 For the present purposes, it does not matter whether that share is ½, though in practice it almost always is. 20 Byres, “Historical Perspectives.” 21 P. J. Jones, “Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime: Italy,” in M. M.
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Recent quantitative studies show that their diffusion can be related to imperfect capital markets and incentive compatibility issues.22 The intensification of farming that resulted from rising population pressure in the late Middle Ages altered relative factor prices and encouraged the creation of exclusive property rights in land. As techniques became more labor intensive the scope for opportunism by laborers increased, as did the cost of careless or dishonest activity. Supervision was difficult for landlords, who increasingly were urban dwellers engaged in trade or manufacturing, and one way to reduce the problem was to introduce strong self-monitoring incentives. After the demographic crisis of the fourteenth century, changing terms of trade altered the crop mix in favor of costly products with high sensitivity to proper care and handling, such as vines, olive and fruit trees. Share contracts responded easily to this new situation by allowing landlords to concentrate costly resources on supervising invested capital while in effect leaving tenants to run the farm on a daily basis. The sharing rule went some way towards solving the monitoring problem, but at a cost. Multiple performance margins and strong exogenous influences meant that room for discretion had to be built into the contract, which in turn gave renewed scope for opportunism. Since not all opportunistic choices would have been known at the time when the early contracts were designed, it is possible to imagine landlords and tenants being engaged over the years in a repeated positive-sum game with learning. The object of the game was to appropriate as much of the joint product as possible while limiting one’s own contribution to the competitive minimum. Thus tenants sought to reduce their inputs into the proPostan and H. J. Habakkuk, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), I: 340-430; P. J. Jones, “From Manor to Mezzadria,” in N. Rubinstein, ed., Florentine Studies (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 193-241. 22 F. L. Galassi, “Tuscans and Their Farms: The Economics of Share Tenancy in Fifteenth Century Florence,” Rivista di Storia Economica 9 (1992): 77-94; F. L. Galassi, “Moral Hazard and Assets Specifically in the Renaissance: The Economics of Sharecropping in 1427 Florence,” Advances in Agricultural Economic History 1 (2000): 177-206; S. Pudney, F. L. Galassi, and F. Mealli, “A Discrete Random-Effects Panel Data Model of Farm Tenures in Fifteenth Century Florence,” Economica 65 (1998): 535-56; D. A. Ackerberg and M. Botticini, “The Choice of Agrarian Contracts in Early Renaissance Tuscany: Risk Sharing, Moral Hazard, or Capital Market Imperfections?” Explorations in Economic History 37 (2000): 241-57.
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duction process, mostly labor, both because labor creates disutility and because of Marshallian disincentives caused by the sharing rule. At the same time, they would seek to draw the largest possible benefit from the capital invested in the farm. Landlords, of course, had the incentive to skimp on capital investment and force tenants to work as much as possible.23 Tenants were constrained by the probability of detection, and possible sanctions, including dismissal, while landlords were constrained by monitoring costs and the tenants’ shadow reservation wage. Each time the game was played, there was a probability that some player would find a new margin over which to capture some portion of the income streams. If the gambit produced a reward, other players would adopt it, and eventually measures to regulate or prohibit it would wind their way into the contract. Tenants and landlords were very well aware that they were engaged in this game. That is the explanation for the obligation the Abbey of San Salvatore imposed on Leuprandus to reside on the farm (limit his opportunities to undersupply labor) in the 821 contract. Over 400 years later, the game was still going on. On 11 August 1255 a court in Lucca sentenced a sharecropper named Grispi to pay his landlord three pounds in damages for “not ploughing and sowing at the appropriate time as he had undertaken to do.”24 Two centuries later, L. B. Alberti, one of the architects of the Italian Renaissance as well as a rich landowner, wrote that “I would have my farm in a place ... where I could often go, and take my exercise walking around it, and the labourers, seeing me often, would cheat rarely ... and be more diligent at their work.”25 In general, Luporini and Parigi have shown that limitations imposed on tenants’ activities are statically efficient in a multi-tasking framework.26 The point is that the margins where either party could engage in opportunistic behavior were likely not at first fully known to either landlords or tenants. Ways of pruning vines, for instance, so 23 Note that neither incentive exists in contracts where one party acts as full residual claimant. 24 Imberciadori, Mezzadria, 90. 25 L. B. Alberti, Della famiglia (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, [1468] 1906), 210, my emphasis. 26 A. Luporini and B. Parigi, “Multitask Sharecropping Contracts: The Italian Mezzadria,” Economica 63 (1996): 445-58.
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as to maximize short-term output at the cost of the longevity of the plant, something that benefitted the tenant, probably had to be worked out over time. The “thieving sharecropper” was a stock character of Renaissance plays and stories, where tenants are often shown teaching one another how to hide grain already mown but not yet threshed, how to extract wine from a sealed barrel without leaving marks, or how to work away from the farm without the landlord finding out.27 In addition, careless handling of tools or livestock could affect the capital value of the landlord’s investment, but it was difficult to predict ex ante what form damage caused by neglect (a manifestation of opportunism) might take. Like other activities, cheating and monitoring, and especially knowing what to monitor, have a learning curve. If that is correct, then it is reasonable to argue that the early contracts were signed by people who had not yet traveled far on that curve. In other words, in the earlier period of the contract’s life there may still have been a great deal of uncertainty about how to make the agreement work to one’s advantage. Repeated interaction revealed this over time, and the contract changed as a result. Another way of saying this is that characteristics acquired over time spread through the population. This is the general hypothesis of the paper. Testing it is the next step. A reasonable approach to designing a test is to use the earliest contracts as a benchmark, and to track deviations from their set of clauses over time. But showing that change takes place is not evidence of evolution in the sense used in Section I. What needs to be shown is that there is a line of transmission of these changes, or putting it differently, that changes in the set of clauses are directional and cumulative. There must be, in other words, learning. The next section discusses the design of the test. IV Contracts, even simple ones, are multifaceted mutual commitments operating on several margins simultaneously. The definition 27
G. Cherubini, L’Italia rurale nel Basso Medioevo (Rome: Laterza, 1984), 134-8; C. Bec, “Le paysan dans la nouvelle Toscane,” in Civiltà ed economia agricola in Toscana nei secc. XIII-XV: problemi della vita delle campagne nel tardo medioevo (Pistoia: Centro italiano di studi di storia e d’arte, 1981), 29-52.
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I am employing, viz., share-rent paid for an “improved” farm and tenant’s residence obligation, forms the core of mezzadria, the constant linking Leuprandus to the second half of the twentieth century. Any element detailing an obligation incurred by either party in addition to that basic core I will call a “clause.” This section identifies a group of clauses to be tracked as they spread through the population, then discusses the sample used and presents summary statistics of the contracts under consideration. An econometric test is carried out in section V. Two basic issues need to be addressed to study mezzadria in an evolutionary framework. First, the clauses whose presence is tracked must be clearly identifiable. This means that they have to be reasonably simple clauses, so that there can be no question of one appearing in a modified form that may alter its effect on the contracting parties. At the same time, they cannot be those common catch-all clauses (e.g., “the tenant promises to work well”) of little practical value. I will call clauses satisfying these criteria “nonreducible rules.” Secondly, the clauses must not be picked only because they are common in later contracts. That would vitiate the analysis. Rather the choice must be based on a priori considerations: if I am right that sharecropping was a way of introducing incentive compatibility, then the clauses that spread should be those that further constrain opportunistic behaviour. To show that an evolutionary approach can yield insight into institutional changes, the chosen clauses must then be shown to have spread chronologically and/or geographically from their inception point. Because I cannot observe communication flows between actors, I have to rely on geographic or chronological proximity to argue that a solution found in one location spread (that is, increased its frequency in the population). To anticipate one possible objection, the sample contracts are obviously unlikely to include the very first instance of clause c making its appearance, and even if they do I have no way of knowing this. However, all that matters is that c should at some point start to spread in the population, wherever and whenever it first appeared. No priors exist as to when or where c began. It is the process of spreading that I am trying to follow. The non-reducible rules I propose to track are three and are also, in a sense, the obvious ones to follow given the agency framework I am using. Besides committing labor on one side, and on the other land and fixed capital, tenants and landlords had to
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agree on who would supply at least three other significant inputs: seed, tools, and livestock. If the landlord supplied them, tenants had no incentive to care for them. Tales of seed given for sowing but never put in the ground (as in Grispi’s case), of cattle worked too hard or not properly fed, of tools broken, stolen, or left in the fields, are common complaints for medieval and Renaissance landlords in Tuscany.28 On the other hand, if tenants supplied complementary inputs, they had the incentive to use as much of the farm output as possible to feed their own livestock, and to sow what they wished. No magic formula could protect everybody. Landlords may have preferred to shift the burden of supplying complementary inputs on their tenants, but even aside from the latter’s ability to incur the cost this was a mixed blessing at best. Animals fattened on the farm’s output would be sold by the tenant to his sole benefit, or be leased out to work other farms. Sharing inputs was resorted to, but even so the agency problem remained acute for the landlord: one can imagine a tenant reporting that “your cow has died.” With the advantage of hindsight, one reasonably stable solution was to force tenants to internalize as many of the costs of supplying complementary inputs as possible, while using scarce monitoring resources to ensure that they did not divert income streams from the farm to maintain their own capital beyond a certain point. The last part of this sentence is deliberately vague: finding the right tolerance for such “diversions” was not easy. At what point is the tenant siphoning rent? How expensive is it to stop him? Perhaps above all, how can you really tell how much is being siphoned? In spite of such metering problems, however, the advantage of passing these costs on to tenants was that the range of necessary monitoring activities shrank. If this reasoning is at least broadly correct, then I expect to find that sharecropping contracts over time increasingly came to include clauses that shifted onto the tenant the responsibility for the provision of complementary inputs, once other factors are taken into account. To be more specific, the supply of working capital was subject to bargaining between tenants and landlords. The outcome of the bargaining was affected by several unobservable variables, but ultimately must have been decided by the land/labor ratio. If 28
Cherubini, L’Italia, 134-8.
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tenants could not easily find another farm, landlords must have been able to force them to internalize more costs than tenants would have liked. If tenants were scarce, landlords would have to supply a greater proportion of complementary inputs and thereby shoulder the risk of incurring capital losses. Demographic trends will matter to the test of the evolution of mezzadria. The discussion so far has mostly set the stage and presented in general terms what testing is to be carried out. The time has come to focus more closely on the sample. The 832 contracts of the sample, written between 821 and 1517 A.D., have been collected from the notarial chartularies of the State Archives of Florence, Siena, Lucca, Pisa and Arezzo, and published over the past fifty years.29 Given their great age (42 per cent of sample contracts predate 1300), the sample is almost surprisingly large, yet it obviously represents only a minute fraction of all sharecropping contracts signed over these seven centuries. The contracts relate in all cases to first-time agreements (renewal or termination were oral), and have been selected trying to maximize temporal continuity and geographic coverage.30 The number of contracts extant in the archives drops off dramatically during the sixteenth century, something that may indicate that the agreement had achieved a sort of canonical status, so well known that there was little need to reproduce it. This is indirectly confirmed by the strong similarity between the contracts dating from the late 1400s/early 1500s and the standard forms that came to be used in the nineteenth century.31 If so, the contracts of the “early” centuries constitute the case of an institution in full evolutionary adaptation. The wording of the contracts is reasonably standardized, and becomes more so over time, just as the language tends to shift from Latin to Italian. The notary begins his text with religious formulae followed by date and location, then identifies himself and the contracting parties and describes the purpose and duration of the 29 Imberciadori, Mezzadria; G. Pinto and P. Pirillo, Il contratto di mezzadria nella Toscana medievale. Il contado di Siena, sex. XIII-1348 (Florence: Olschki, 1987); O. Muzzi and M. D. Nenci, Il contratto di mezzadria nella Toscana medievale. Il contado di Firenze, secolo XIII (Florence: Olschki, 1988); G. Piccinni, Il contratto di mezzadria nella Toscana medievale. Il contado di Siena, 1349-1518 (Florence: Olschki, 1992). 30 Pinto and Pirillo, Il contratto, for sampling criteria. 31 Piccinni, Il contratto, 325-80; Mazzini, La Toscana, 463-6.
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contract. There follows a description of the farm and its location, with details of the house or other buildings such as stables, granaries and wine and oil making equipment. There follow the clauses agreed upon by the parties. Almost invariably, the tenant’s residence obligation is the first mentioned, followed by the details for the provision of seed, livestock and tools of direct interest to this analysis. Other clauses include where the rent had to be paid (on the farm or at the landlord’s residence), lists of capital maintenance work to be carried out each year, any additional payments owed for keeping fowls or other animals not directly covered by the contract, the prohibition (usually) from seeking work off the farm, and a list of loans, if any, received by the tenant to start work. Fines are set against either party failing to live up to their commitments and at times arbitration procedures are outlined. An inventory of stocks already on the farm is then added, and the contracts end with the list of witnesses and the signatures (or marks) of all present. This is in fact a wealth of information. For all contracts we know where landlords lived and where they signed the agreement with their new tenants. We do not always know exactly where the actual farm was, though we know which political jurisdiction it came under. We know something about the crop mix of the farm and the presence of animals and buildings/improvement works. More importantly, we have over 800 observations of a well-defined institution scattered across the arc of some 700 years in a restricted geographic area where we have reasonably good information about other important historical events, such as demographic trends. Even considering that not all contract specifically list the three clauses I am trying to track (only about 500 do, depending on which clause), this is still a remarkable sample. Above all, I have a clear question I can ask these data: do the non-reducible rules aimed at limiting discretion in an agency context spread chronologically and geographically in such a way as to suggest a learning process? Do these contracts evolve? Or are the changes non-directional? Table 1 reports some summary statistics relating to these clauses. Some comments are in order. First, the periodization. Since very few contracts (hardly a dozen) survive from before 1199, the first column inevitably covers an abnormally long time period. The other peculiarity may appear to be the division at 1347. The late 1340s marked a dramatic crisis all over Europe as the Black Death
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These bare demographic facts fit easily with the trends in the clauses highlighted in the table. In the centuries of demographic expansion, when that is the land/labor ratio was steadily falling, the bargaining between landlords and tenants was being resolved against the latter. Their contribution was rising, whether in the provision of livestock or of seed. There is a hint in these data that at the peak of the demographic boom (early fourteenth century) tenants may have grown increasingly unable to meet the kind of capital commitment required of them: the proportion of tenants supplying all livestock (the most expensive working capital) in the first half of the 1300s is halved relative to the proportion in the previous century. The Malthusian limit was fast approaching. The mid-fourteenth century constitutes a structural break. Thereafter, landlords increasingly had to commit complementary inputs to their farms and renounce gains accumulated since 1200. By the fifteenth century livestock is almost always wholly supplied by landlords (fewer than one in forty or fifty supplied all livestock between 1200 and 1347), and seed is almost always shared (tenants supplied all seed in 50 per cent of contracts from 1200-1347). Evidence of changing relative bargaining power, which is all the table shows, does not per se constitute evidence of “evolution” in the sense discussed above. An evolutionary adaptation involves transmission, in this case by learning. How can this learning process be modeled? My argument is that, before the sixteenth century when the contract became so well established that it was seldom written down, landlords and tenants were engaged in an ongoing search for the appropriate solution to the agency problems they faced. They knew what they wished to achieve in entering into the agreement, but probably did not actually have a fully formed mental picture of how to go about their goals. The complexity of the tasks that had to be carried out, their contingent nature and the uncertainty inherent in any agreement where time consistency was a significant element and exogenous influences were strong, meant that the parties could hardly devote time and resources to working out in the necessary detail what clauses to impose on one another. Fortunately this was not necessary because they could hire a specialist, the notary, who had experience of contracting practices, had already designed clauses aimed at obtaining the results they Sociales, 1978).
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sought, and could sell them a reasonably standardized commodity easily adjustable to suit their particular circumstances. The notary sold information, in effect, or to put it differently sold a reduction in uncertainty. In addition, he provided a reference point on current accepted practice, something of considerable value to both tenant and landlord who were thereby spared the trouble of analyzing to the end of their computational abilities each clause of the agreement. The notary’s commodity was, that is, also the reassurance to the contracting parties that in using the agreement he designed they could expect that on average they would be no worse off than their reference group. For his part, the notary worked on past practice and current concerns. He can be modeled as storing a set of non-reducible rules for contracts of this sort, a kind of template in which the details of any given pair of landlords and tenants could be entered, with the necessary modifications. Notaries were organized in guilds, like other trades, and it seems logical to see such organizations as information-sharing machines.33 The basic template learned during the notary’s studies and apprenticeship would be continuously checked against current practice in conversation and professional contacts with other guild members.34 The template would then be adjusted as practice changed, as new solutions to old problems were devised, or as existing approaches were discarded. The selective pressures were at work in the mind of the notary, where individual non-reducible rules stored as part of the template were checked, assessed, and possibly modified. The process was self reinforcing in the sense that a modification to the template which found favor with the contracting parties would be used again and therefore would have a greater-than-average probability of being discussed within the corporation and consequently of spreading to other notaries and other contracts. If that is at least a reasonable approximation of the process, it follows that modifications to the template were more likely to spread rapidly in the immediate geographic proximity of their inception, only later “colonizing” more distant populations. The
33 S. R. Epstein, “Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship and Technological Change in Pre-industrial Europe,” Journal of Economic History 58 (1998): 684-713. 34 For examples see G. Catoni, “Il collegio notarile di Siena,” in Il notariato nella civiltà toscana (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale del Notariato, 1985), 337-65.
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advantage of putting the issue in these terms (chronological and geographic proximity) is that I can derive some reasonably strong predictions and can then use the sample contracts to test them. That is the task of the next section.
V This section specifies and tests a multinomial logit model to detect directionality, and therefore learning, in the changes undergone by sample contracts. First, I will specify the form the model takes, and then discuss the variables used. Let l, s, t indicate livestock, seed, and tools, and L, S, T represent whether each of the complementary input is supplied by the landlords, shared, or by the tenant. I will then use superscript letters { l, s, t} to indicate under what arrangement complementary inputs are supplied, so that for example Ls indicates the seed is supplied by the landlord, while Sl indicates that the livestock is shared. Let P(cij=k) be the probability of clause cj being recorded in contract i. Then, for the supply of inputs by the landlord, L, I can write: exp(ßixi) P cij = Lk xi = ··µµ for k = {l,s,t} k r 1 + exp(ßixi) where ß and x represent respectively vectors of coefficients and explanatory variables. Likewise, for shared inputs, S, 1 P cij = Sk xi = ··µµ k r 1 + exp(ßixi) and for tenant supplied inputs P cij = Tk xi = 0
k
r
The technique is sufficiently well known to require little discussion beyond pointing out that the ßs estimate the impact on P(cij) relative to the normalized probability of observing k supplied by the tenant, which is set to zero. The framework is simple but useful
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in the present context. I can now turn to discussing the actual variables. I said earlier that for evolutionary pressures to have been at work on the contract there has to be evidence of directional modifications. The discussion in IV above allows me to put some flesh on these bones. Specifically, ceteris paribus, the probability of encountering clause c in contract i should rise with time elapsed since c is first encountered in the sample, and fall with the distance from the location where the first instance of c is recorded in the sample. However, the extremely long time period covered by the sample makes it necessary to qualify these priors. It is unrealistic to suggest that notaries referred back several centuries when modifying the template, so it is opportune to relate P(ci=1) to the time elapsed since c was last encountered in the sample. As for distance, I am using both the kilometers from the location where c is last recorded, and from where it is first recorded in the sample. If evolutionary pressures were at work as discussed above, I would expect that the more recent was the use of c, the higher was P(ci=1), and that the farther away were its last and first use, the lower is P(ci=1). There should be, in other words, waves of diffusion. Note that, as there appears to be no reason to believe diffusion should be linear, both time (in years) and distance (in km) have been used in linear and quadratic form. The distance variable poses some conceptual problems. Its role is to capture the geographic spread of a given clause, and to do so accurately to the conditions of the time. It follows that what matters is the distance that the carriers of the template modifications, the notaries, had to travel between one place and the next. This distance is fixed in some ways (Siena and Florence are no farther apart today than they were in 1300), but the time taken traveling it is not. Ignoring improvements in transportation technology, which should not significantly affect this sample, travel conditions change. It may also be questioned whether today’s roads are sufficiently close to the roads of the time to allow a modern kilometer count to approximate historical conditions. Both objections are valid, and no real solution to them exists, except to note that the results reported below suggest that the distance variables seem to mirror reasonably well the cost of spreading information. Since the sample is not evenly spread over the 700 years it covers, having very few observations before 1200, and since demo-
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graphic trends obviously had a significant impact on the clauses used in these contracts (Table 1), each regression will include four chronological dummy variables, one for the period before 1200 when population was growing but few contracts remain, one for the period of demographic expansion when numerous contracts have survived (up to 1347), one for the years of crisis (1348-1400), and one for the slow recovery of the fifteenth century. Finally, another dummy will attempt to capture the effects of political jurisdiction: Does it matter whether a contract was signed in Florentine territory, or in Sienese territory? Out of the three sets of clauses in Table 1, only the regressions using the supply of tools as the dependent variable failed all diagnostic tests, and are therefore not reported. This was due to the very small number of contracts where tools are specifically mentioned (in all, about two dozen for the 1200-1350 period and none before or after) which leaves virtually no degrees of freedom. Table 2 reports the estimates (t statistics in round brackets, (), significance levels in square brackets []). On balance the results are almost surprisingly robust for a sample such as this. The only two variables that consistently fail to reach significance are, first, the time squared elapsed since any given clause was last recorded and, second, the political jurisdiction dummy. The former actually worsens the performance of the estimates, and was therefore omitted altogether from Table 2. As for the latter, whether or not a contract was signed in the territory of Florence appears to have had no effect on the probability of particular clauses being included. This is in a way not surprising: in spite of centuries of conflict between Siena and Florence, the two city-states shared a language and a common cultural and legal heritage (Roman law). Information evidently flowed easily across their contested boundaries. Overall, the distance variables perform markedly better than the time elapsed variables (excluding, that is, the period dummies). The linear time variable is significant in only two of four cases, and even then only once at 5 per cent (in the other case, it has the “wrong” sign, suggesting that as more time passed since the last use of the clause, the lower was the probability of finding it again). On the other hand, the distance variables all have the “correct” sign (negative) and often are significant at remarkably high levels (1 and 2 per cent). On balance, the variables measuring distance from the
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last recorded use of the clause (linear or squared) perform better than the distance from the location of first use. This is powerful evidence in favor of evolutionary spreading. The mutation introduced in the population was passed on to geographically proximate carriers, in a process that must resemble what I discussed in Part IV above. Interestingly, if all distance variables are omitted from the estimate, and the logit is recalculated with all the time variables and the political jurisdiction dummy, the latter is weakly significant (10 per cent) and negative in all cases. This is not surprising: since the earliest contracts are from Siena, once distance is taken out of the estimates, contracts signed in Florentine territory are less likely to include particular clauses. But it is the distance, not the political jurisdiction, that is driving the parameters. What do the estimates suggest about the nature of this diffusion? The evidence is ambiguous. In some cases, notably the probability that landlords would supply livestock vs. that tenants would, it appears that the diffusion follows a quadratic rather than linear form. In other cases (the probability that seed would be shared vs. that tenants would supply it) the coefficients suggest linearity. In some ways, this latter is intuitively convincing: if modifications to the original template traveled with notaries, provided that traveling times and costs were linear in the distance traveled, linearity in diffusion is to be expected. In this sense, the estimated coefficients for quadratic variables may indicate that beyond a certain point, traveling costs rose so that diffusion was slowed down above a certain distance. In any event, quadratic distance variables, even if strongly significant at times, are rather “weak.” Their marginal effects tend to be in the order of fractions of percentage points. The time dummies, which try to capture changing demographic trends, tell an interesting story. The worsening of the tenants’ bargaining power during the centuries of demographic growth is quite visible in the negative coefficients relating the probability that complementary inputs would be supplied by landlords or shared to the period 1200 to 1347. Equally evident on balance is the reversal of the trend after the Black Death: the probability that the supply of seed and livestock would be shared or taken on entirely by the landlord rises after 1347. If the distance variables were insignificant, this kind of result would suggest that mutations had arisen in several distinct locations independently. But it is the significance of
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the distance parameter estimates that underscores that learning was in fact taking place. The story probably goes something like this. The mezzadria contract fulfilled the function of giving labor self-monitoring incentives in conditions where it was costly to solve agency problems through direct supervision. The downside of the sharing rule was that both parties had an incentive to economize on their complementary inputs (= supply inputs only up to the point where their marginal product equaled their opportunity cost times the reciprocal of the rental share). If the technical coefficients of production were not fixed, bargaining between the contracting parties would determine their respective contributions. There was, and this must be stressed, no unique optimizing solution, no well-defined point of tangency among Edgeworthian contract curves, which require that actors be interchangeable and rules continuous.35 There was rather an area of possible outcomes, and over this area Tuscan landlords and tenants bargained to and fro for centuries. A landlord who had to supply tenants with seed in the early fifteenth century may have been, in some abstract sense, worse off than his ancestor who had obtained it from his tenants 150 years earlier, but was still better off than not having tenants at all. But above all what the logit strongly suggests is that there was in fact an evolutionary process at work here. The contingent events of a given time period affected the outcomes of the bargaining processes, but so did access to information about how best to make use of changing circumstances. There is, in other words, reason to believe that the changing relative contributions embodied in these clauses were not arrived at independently at different places and different times. Rather, they spread: distance (and, less clearly, time) matters to relative probabilities estimated by the logit. In periods of stress, that is in periods when one party was willing to give up some ground to gain access to an income stream, the carriers of the template, the notaries, must have communicated with one another (even across political boundaries) to find solutions, i.e., to identify successful mutations that would spread in the population. They communicated with the most proximate colleagues, who in turn spoke to others farther away, who in turn repeated the process. Any given solution spread 35
Knight, Institutions.
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because it reduced uncertainty for increasing number of people who found existing arrangements unsatisfactory. A notary who could satisfy many clients by introducing a “good” adaptation in the template would have additional clients beating a path to his door, and would be copied by other notaries, thereby ensuring that the successful clause would spread further. It matters little to present purposes that one or the other party lost or gained something as a result of each mutation. In fact, focusing on the clauses themselves makes the game in which landlords and tenants were engaged appear as zero-sum. In reality, however, this was a positive sum game, in that what players were ultimately bargaining for was the final output of land, labor and capital. All that was happening was that the price one or the other player had to pay to have access to this output rose or fell depending on contingent events. And the process by which contingent events affected individuals was an evolutionary one: solutions worked out in one place spread. Diffusion means learning: under certain stimuli, more actors were interested in learning of new solutions.
VI In the end, the exact process of diffusion of contractual clauses in late medieval Tuscan agriculture may in itself be of interest to agrarian historians. But the issue here is whether the historical process is theoretically enlightening for researchers interested in institutional choice and change in general, and it is on that criterion alone that the contribution of this article rests. In that sense the opportunity to follow change over 700 years is useful in that it may help define a research agenda for the analysis of institutional change, an agenda that would seem to consist of three main items. The first is that modeling institutional change requires the identification of the exact unit of selection. The approach taken here is that this is to be found in the simplest “non-reducible” rules, aggregates of which form institutions. The second is to identify the means by which these non-reducible rules are stored and transmitted. In the current instance this has been identified in the “template” of the notaries, and it would seem likely that in general members of the legal profession are likely to perform this function for a large number of institutions. Whether they do or not is an
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empirical question which need not detain us here beyond stressing that transmission is not independent of the transmitter. Finally, and as a consequence of the second point, understanding institutional choice and change involves understanding the incentives of the transmitters. In this case, this aspect has been neglected in that the notaries had no obvious interest in siding with one or the other party when drawing up the contract, unless they were themselves landlords. If so, however this does not seem to have affected the shift in contractual clauses against the interests of landowners after the demographic crisis of the fourteenth century. But those who store the information are not necessarily transmission neutral, and the distributional effects of passing the information on have to be modeled in any credible attempt to understand institutional choice and change as a general process.
x
x
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x
x
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A TEST CASE FOR REGIONAL MARKET INTEGRATION? THE GRAIN TRADE BETWEEN MALTA AND SICILY IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES Mark A. Aloisio
“Malta is very fortunate for this one reason, namely that Sicily, very fertile in all kinds of grain, lies nearby and is for the inhabitants as good as a granary, where otherwise they would die of hunger.”1 I The economy of medieval Europe is increasingly studied in the context of a “commercialist” or Smithian framework.2 This approach emphasizes the role of trade in promoting a greater division of labor in town and countryside, the expansion of commercial activity, and the progressive integration and greater sophistication of regional market networks. Towns perform a crucial role in these models, whereby urban demand for foodstuffs stimulates specialization and higher levels of productivity in agriculture, as well as more efficient distribution of resources. Yet while few would dispute the increased commercialization and sophistication of the late medieval economy generally, the extent and effect of these changes at a regional or local level is less clear. Legal, institutional or social barriers represented transaction costs that could significantly limit the flow of trade or access to markets. In the fifteenth century, the kingdom of Sicily—of which the Maltese Islands formed part—was a politically 1
J. Quintin D’Autun, Insulae Melitae descriptio (Lyons 1536), ed. with trans. in H. R. Vella, The Earliest Description of Malta (Lyons 1536) (Malta: DeBono Enterprises, 1980), 35. 2 For instance, R. H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 10001500, 2nd. ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); J. Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England, 1150-1350 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). For an exposition of the commercialist approach, J. Hatcher and M. Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages. The History and Theory of England’s Economic Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 121-73.
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unified state with a relatively commercialized economy. It has recently been argued that during the late Middle Ages Sicily’s internal markets became progressively more integrated. In the course of this paper I wish to discuss the extent of this economic integration by highlighting some obstacles that disrupted the trade in grain between Sicily and Malta during much of the fifteenth century. II The important role of Sicily in the grain trade of the medieval Mediterranean is well known.3 At one time or another, Sicilian wheat was exported to cities in northern Italy (particularly Florence and Genoa), France and Spain and occasionally even to north Africa.4 Sicily’s Norman, Angevin and Aragonese rulers took an active interest in the commercial exploitation of this vital commodity, fully aware of the substantial revenues that its export brought into their coffers. Since the reign of Frederick II, the grain trade was channeled through specially designated ports known as caricatori, most of them located in the western half of the island where much of the 3 M. De Boüard, “Problèmes de subsistance dans un état médiéval: le marché et les prix des céréales au royaume angevin de Sicile (1266-1282),” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 10 (1938): 483-501; M. Aymard, “Il commercio dei grani nella Sicilia del ‘500,” Archivio storico per la Sicilia orientale 72 (1975): 7-40; D. Abulafia, “Sul commercio del grano siciliano nel tardo Duecento,” in La società mediterranea all’epoca del Vespro: XI Congresso della Corona d’Aragona, Palermo-Trapani-Erice, 25-30 Aprile 1982, vol. 2 (Palermo: Accademia di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, 1983), 5-22, repr. in D. Abulafia, Italy, Sicily and the Mediterranean 1100-1400 (London: Variorum, 1987), essay VII; O. Cancila, Baroni e popolo nella Sicilia del grano (Palermo: Palumbo, 1983); H. Bresc, Un monde méditerranéen: économie et societé en Sicile, 1300-1450, 2 vols. (Rome-Palermo: Bibliothéques des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 1986); S. R. Epstein, An Island for Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). On the Mediterranean grain trade in the Middle Ages, P. Wolff, “Un grand commerce médiéval: les céréales dans le bassin de la Méditerranée occidentale: Remarques et suggestions,” VI Congreso de la Corona de Aragon, Cerdeña (Madrid: n.p., 1959), 147-74; M. Tangheroni, Aspetti dei commercio dei cereali nei Paesi della Corona d’Aragona, I. La Sardegna (Pisa-Cagliari: Pacini, 1981). 4 D. Abulafia, The Two Italies: Economic Relations between the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and the Northern Communes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); D. Abulafia, “Lo stato e la vita economica,” in P. Toubert and A. Paravicini, ed., Federico II e il mondo mediterraneo (Palermo: Sellerio, 1994), 165-187; M. Del Treppo, I mercanti catalani e l’espansione della Corona d’Aragona nel secolo XV (Naples: L’Arte Tipografica Napoli, 1972).
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grain was grown.5 Sicily produced at least three types of wheat by the sixteenth century but the hard variety (grano duro) was especially prized for its capacity to resist rot while remaining in storage for several years.6 The island’s reputation as a major grain producer was indeed well-founded. In the late thirteenth century annual export levels averaged 20,000 to 30,000 salme and perhaps around 40,000 salme in the following century (1 salma = 2.75 hl).7 Some 122,000 salme were shipped out of Sicilian ports in 1407-1409 but this may have been an exceptional year.8 An average of 50,000 salme was probably typical throughout the 1460s with a maximum of 90,000-100,000 salme in the 1490s.9 Nonetheless, in spite of these impressive figures, estimates put grain exports at less than ten per cent of domestic output, occasionally reaching a maximum share of fifteen per cent.10 It seems therefore that most of the grain produced in Sicily was consumed locally. A system of land and (more importantly) sea transport linked the caricatori of Sciacca, Agrigento and Licata to the two main cities of Palermo, Messina and to smaller centers such as Trapani, Syracuse and Catania. Unlike northern Italy, however, where urban centers frequently obtained jurisdictional authority over the surrounding their contado and its resources, Sicilian cities, with the partial exception of Messina, had little direct control over their hinterland. Stephan Epstein believes that, given their inability to rely on institutional privileges for economic and human resources, Sicily’s towns and cities were forced to obtain these resources on a competitive basis.11 However, this state of affairs, as Epstein himself concedes, did not apply in the case of a strategic and relatively scarce commodity such as grain. 5
Abulafia, “Lo stato,” 165-87. Cancila, Baroni, 44. 7 Bresc, Un monde, 127-8. 8 Cancila, Baroni, 16; C. Trasselli, “Sull’esportazione dei cereali dalla Sicilia negli anni 1402-1407,” Annali della Facoltà di Economia e Commercio dell’Università di Palermo 11 (1957): 217-52, repr. in C. Trasselli, Mediterraneo e Sicilia all’inizio dell’epoca moderna. (Ricerche quattrocentesche) (Cosenza: Pellegrini Editore, 1977), 331-70. 9 Epstein, An Island for Itself, 274. 10 Epstein, An Island for Itself, 275; Cancila, Baroni, 20 reaches similar conclusions. 11 Epstein, An Island for Itself, 133; S. R. Epstein, “Town and Country: Economy and Institutions in Late Medieval Italy,” Economic History Review 46 (3) (1993): 453-77. 6
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In 1392 Martin I of Aragon invaded Sicily in order to restore royal authority and put an end to years of wars and internal political instability.12 The Aragonese monarchy also took steps to revive Sicily’s economy and promote inter-regional trade by establishing new fairs, standardizing weights and measurements, and reducing tolls on internal trade.13 Among the latter measures was a decree passed in 1398 which stated that no tratte or trade permits were to be paid on grain exchanged intra regno and hence destined for internal consumption. Indications are, however, that Sicily’s domestic grain market remained quite fragmented throughout much of the fifteenth century. In this case at least, the monarchy appears to have been unable or reluctant to consistently enforce institutional reforms favoring more open markets. This is hardly surprising given that, in order to do so, the state often needed to act against powerful and entrenched local or sectional interests including monopoly rights of feudal lords and protectionist measures by individual cities.14 In fifteenth-century Messina, the grain trade was effectively controlled by local municipal officials who not only decided the price at which grain was to be sold in the city but frequently also owned the very estates from where that grain was bought.15 My own research based on the notarial archives of Sciacca, one of the principal outlets for the export of grain in Sicily, suggests that the interests of the local authorities were often in conflict with those who had grain for sale because the latter found it more profitable to sell their stocks to Catalan, Genoese and other foreign merchants. The grain reserves of many cities were frequently low and any interruption in the supply chain could provoke considerable hardships for the inhabitants. For instance, Catania’s annual grain requirements in the fifteenth century were in the region of 12,000-15,000 salme while production averaged some 18,000 salme.16
12
V. D’Alessandro, Politica e società nella Sicilia aragonese (Palermo: U. Manfredi, 1963); P. Corrao, Governare un Regno. Potere, società e istituzioni in Sicilia fra Trecento e Quattrocento (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1991). 13 Epstein, An Island for Itself, 96. 14 D. C. North and R. P. Thomas, The Rise of the Western World. A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 97-100. 15 C. Salvo, Giurati, Feudatari Mercanti. L’élite urbana a Messina tra Medio Evo e Età Moderna (Rome: Bibliopolis, 1995), 107-8. 16 A. Petino, Aspetti e momenti di politica granaria a Catania e in Sicilia nel Quattrocento (Catania: Università di Catania, 1952), 30.
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Moreover, the desire on the part of the state to act in the interests of the urban masses and to implement long-term economic reforms often conflicted with more immediate political and fiscal concerns. An example from Agrigento serves to emphasize this point.17 In 1404, after the town’s giurati (municipal officials) had acted to prevent grain exports out of their port, Martin I declared to those officials the monarchy’s intention to act in the interests of the island’s cities first and the merchants second. That assurance notwithstanding, in 1433 the crown had given permission to two feudal lords to establish their own caricatori in the region thereby bypassing that of Agrigento. By then Martin had been succeeded by Alfonso V who intervened directly in the Italian grain markets, selling grain during periods of scarcity and high demand, apparently with great zeal.18 In the 1430s, while engaged in military campaigns against Naples, Alfonso passed a series of measures promoting grain exports at the expense of domestic consumption requirements. The Aragonese king was at that moment desperately in need of funds and provisions, both of which could be obtained by manipulating sales of grain. Thus, in the course of the fifteenth century, as grain exports increased, Sicily’s towns, faced with a growing population and rising grain prices, were increasingly forced into a harsh struggle to gain control over food supplies for their citizens.19 Some of the larger cities managed to either assure themselves of preferential access to grain stocks through special arrangements or by closing ports or even by interdicting grain destined for export. Smaller communities, such as the Maltese Islands, often faced even greater difficulties. III The Maltese islands, consisting of Malta, Gozo and Comino, have a combined area of only about 316 square kilometers. The surface is rocky in most places, the soil is shallow and water generally scarce 17
V. D’Alessandro, “Paesaggio agrario, regime della terra e società rurale (secoli XI-XV),” in V. D’Alessandro, Terra, nobili e borghesi nella Sicilia medievale (Palermo: Sellerio, 1994), 58-60; orig. publ. in R. Romano, ed., Storia della Sicilia, 10 vols. (Naples: Società editrice Storia di Napoli e della Sicilia, 1980), 3: 411-47. 18 Del Treppo, I mercanti, 357-9 and Chap. 3. 19 Bresc, Un monde, 744-7.
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so that even today agriculture is heavily dependent on winter precipitation. The archipelago was incorporated into the Norman kingdom of Sicily in the late eleventh century and after 1282 became a peripheral outpost of the Crown of Aragon.20 In spite of the harsh physical environment, Malta (the largest of the three islands) managed to support a sizeable population throughout the late middle ages, probably hovering around 10,000 by the early fifteenth century. The only sizeable concentrations of people on Malta were the town of Mdina with its suburb of Rabat in the center and the royal castle at Birgu, which guarded the island’s main harbor located in the south-east. Most other inhabitants were dispersed in rural settlements where they cultivated their own fields or worked on the larger private fiefs or royal estates. Agriculture was the mainstay of the economy and the land was worked by a free peasantry, with wheat, cumin and cotton being the principal crops. Cotton, both raw and in spun form, was widely exported and provided a valuable source of income through which Malta was able to pay for the growing necessity to purchase wheat from nearby Sicily.21 Given their geographical proximity, and the fact that they both formed part of the same political order, it was natural for the Maltese to look to Sicily, a mere 60 km away, to supply local needs. Sicilian wheat was of superior quality compared to that grown in Malta and was therefore always in demand. Nonetheless, the need for Malta to import grain was probably not acute prior to the fifteenth century.22 A number of instances are known in the fourteenth century when Malta actually exported grain to Sicily but even then these were probably unusual occurrences. A more accurate picture 20
A. T. Luttrell, “Approaches to Medieval Malta,” in A. T. Luttrell, ed., Medieval Malta. Studies on Malta before the Knights (London: The British School at Rome, 1975), 1-70, repr. in A. T. Luttrell, The Making of Christian Malta (Aldershot: Variorum, 2002), remains the best introduction to the island’s medieval history. For more recent overviews, C. Dalli, Iz-Zmien Nofsani Malti (Malta: Pubblikazzjonijiet Indipendenza, 2002); B. Blouet, The Story of Malta, rev. ed. (Malta: Progress Press, 2004). 21 H. Bresc, “The ‘Secrezia’ and the Royal Patrimony in Malta: 1240-1450,” in Luttrell, Medieval Malta, 132. Maltese cotton is mentioned in Genoa in 1164: Abulafia, The Two Italies, 218. In the fifteenth century it was extensively utilized in Barcelona and also in Genoa and Montpellier. Del Treppo provides several examples of Catalan merchants purchasing cotton in Malta. 22 G. Wettinger, “Agriculture in Malta in the Late Middle Ages,” in M. Buhagiar, ed., Proceedings of History Week 1981 (Malta: The Malta Historical Society, 1982), 13.
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of Malta’s grain requirements is possible for the fifteenth century for which more documentary material has survived.23 In 1435 the Maltese claimed that grain shortages occurred every two to three years and were reducing the island to “great poverty.”24 The Maltese historian Godfrey Wettinger argues that in this period it became increasingly necessary to supplement local production with regular imports, probably on the order of 1000-2000 salme each year.25 In critical moments the estimated need for grain could be higher still. In 1468, which admittedly may have been an unusually harsh year, the municipal council ordered the purchase of 4,000 salme, while in 1480, faced with the threat of a Turkish invasion, the authorities debated whether they should purchase 2,000, 3,000, or 5,000 salme.26 Given that one salma was equivalent to the yearly consumption for 1-1.5 individuals, these figures represent significant amounts that must have imposed a considerable financial burden on the island’s limited resources. A population list from 1480 for the community of Rabat, possibly drawn up in response to the above-mentioned invasion scare, indicated that its population of 317 households necessitated an additional 896 salme of grain.27 Certainly the need to import grain pressed ever more urgently upon the Maltese authorities between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, as the island experienced a demographic upsurge that doubled the population to almost 20,000 by 153028 (at the time of the arrival of the knights 23 The main sources utilized here are the records of the Maltese municipal administration, in G. Wettinger, ed., Acta Iuratorum et Consilii Civitatis et Insulae Maltae (Palermo: Associazione di Studi Malta-Sicilia/Centro di Studi Filologici e Linguistici Siciliani, 1993). 24 S. Giambruno and L. Genuardi, eds., Capitoli inediti delle città demaniali di Sicilia approvati sino al 1458, 1, Alcamo-Malta (Palermo: Boccone del povero, 1918), 409: “ki omni dui oy tri anni pati penuria di victuaglu per ki a quista chitati et insola fa misteri trahiri di Sichilia gran quantitati di frumenti.” 25 Wettinger, “Agriculture in Malta,” 14. 26 Wettinger, Acta Iuratorum, § 286, § 772. 27 S. Fiorini, “Li Buki di Rabatu: The Population of Rabat c. 1480,” in T. Cortis, T. Freller, L. Bugeja, ed., Melitensium Amor. Festschrift in honour of Dun Gwann Azzopardi (Malta: Gutenberg Press, 2002), 73-96. 28 G. Wettinger, “The Militia List of 1419-20: A New Starting Point for the Study of Malta’s Population,” Melita Historica 5 (2) (1969): 80-106; S. Fiorini, “Malta in 1530,” in V. Mallia-Milanes, ed., Hospitaller Malta 1530-1798. Studies on Early Modern Malta and the Order of St. John of Jerusalem (Malta: Mireva, 1993), 121-6. Comparable demographic growth patterns have been observed for Sicily in the later fifteenth century: M. Aymard, “Une croissance sélective: la population sicilienne aux XVIe-XVIIe siècles,” Mélanges de la Casa de
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of St John). By then, Malta and Gozo were importing about 9,000 salme of wheat annually.29 As in other towns and cities in Sicily, the task of ensuring that the population were adequately supplied with wheat was the responsibility of the local municipal council or universitas.30 The universitas of Malta was based at Mdina but its jurisdiction in fact extended beyond the limits of that town to include all the villages on the island, where a large section of the population lived. In addition to the procurement of grain, the universitas oversaw the defense of the island, the farming out of indirect taxes (gabelle) on imported and exported goods, and the enforcement of price controls on foodstuffs. The principal officials of the universitas were the captain, who was appointed by the royal authorities, and the jurati, who were chosen locally and served for one year. Studies on the Maltese universitas and other universitates in Sicily have demonstrated that they tended to be dominated by a small group of families, who often viewed public office as an opportunity to promote sectional or private interests.31 From 1402 to 1457, the universitas of Malta was effectively controlled by 68 families, of whom only 42 had members who became jurati. Moreover, that office was in fact monopolized by fourteen families whose members received 101 of 145 municipal appointments.32 The precise extent to which personal interests impinged on the public responsibility of the universitas to provision its citizens with grain is difficult to assess. The language used in the debates that took place during council meetings was often vague and the necessary prosopographical research that can identify relations among different families or groups has not yet been done. However, the proVelasquez (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1968), 4: 303-27. 29 Wettinger, “Agriculture in Malta,” 14. 30 P. Corrao, “Assemblee municipali nella Sicilia tardomedievale: note sul caso maltese,” in P. Xuereb, ed., Karissime Gotifride. Historical Essays Presented to Professor Godfrey Wettinger on his Seventieth Birthday (Malta: Malta University Press, 1999), 37-46; Fiorini, “Malta in 1530,” 111-98. Roughly 16 per cent of debates and deliberations within the town council between 1450 and 1499 concerned matters relating to grain. 31 C. Dalli, “Capitoli: The Voice of an Elite,” in S. Fiorini, ed., Proceedings of History Week 1992 (Malta: The Malta Historical Society, 1994), 1-18. For similar patterns of behavior within the universitas of Messina, Salvo, Giurati, 95-120. 32 Bresc, Un monde, 727.
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posals put forward by some council members frequently appear to have specifically favored certain individuals at the expense of others. For instance, in March 1474 a number of merchants protested a decision by the universitas that prohibited the sale of grain for eight days with the exception of one merchant who a few days earlier had been allowed to sell a quantity of wheat at the high price of 21 tarì per salma.33 In other instances, some jurati attempted to manipulate the selling price of imported grain to favor another merchant who was entrusted with its procurement (and who served periodically as a jurato). If these examples represent a more widespread pattern of behavior among Maltese municipal authorities at the time they would have certainly represented a further disruption to the flow of trade in grain between the two islands. When it became necessary to import wheat to Malta, communal officials often appointed a representative charged with its procurement. They also needed to decide how much grain to buy and at what price, and the price at which it would be sold in Malta.34 The Maltese universitas, like other Sicilian towns, had consuls in various parts of Sicily where its merchants traded, including Licata and Syracuse, and these officials most likely functioned as intermediaries between sellers and buyers. Most grain destined for Malta was apparently shipped from Terranova, Licata and Syracuse, all on Sicily’s southern coast. At other times, the Maltese authorities were approached directly by individuals or firms willing to bring grain to the island. In that case, the jurati discussed the offer and, if found acceptable, gave permission for the deal to take place. Contemporary records indicate the involvement of Maltese and Sicilians in this trade but Catalan merchants were especially prominent. This activity confirms a pattern, already delineated by Mario Del Treppo, whereby Catalans supplied cloth and agricultural products to Malta in 33 Wettinger, Acta Iuratorum, § 556, § 561, § 562. As in Sicily, the money of account used in Malta and Gozo was the uncia, tarì, grani and denari (1 uncia = 30 tarì, 1 tarì = 20 grani, 1 grano = 6 denari). The Maltese uncia was equivalent to around one-seventh of that of Sicily in the late fifteenth century. 34 Wettinger, Acta Iuratorum, § 219 (1462): council granted Fredericus Calabachi, a fellow jurat, “liberam et generalem potestatem administracionem et procuram pro emendo frumentum per universitatem et illud mictendo cum navigiis et si invenerit aliquem qui offeret fornire insolam frumento pro toto anno eciam ad granos duos ultra quod veniret ad expensas universitates quod habeat licenciam concordandi hoc prestito per eum juramento sollempni dum modo quod alii ferentes possent vendere ...”
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exchange for Maltese raw and spun cotton.35 As a territory that formed part of the kingdom of Sicily, commercial relations between Malta and Sicily should have been categorized as internal trade, and hence exempted from payment of licences, known as tratte, that were levied on exports of grain fuori regno. In practice things worked rather differently. In fact, one of the most pressing concerns for the Maltese universitas in the early fifteenth century was to obtain from the royal officials a permanent exemption from payment of the tratte and other taxes on trade. This aim appeared to have been realized in 1398, when shortly after the restoration of Aragonese power in Sicily, Martin I exempted from export duties all commerce intra regno involving grain and foodstuffs traded by sea. That privilege was hitherto enjoyed only by the city of Messina but was now extended throughout the demesne which included most universitates, among them that of Malta.36 In 1416 however, the Maltese petitioned Ferdinand I to reconfirm that privilege, alleging that they were being taxed at one-half tratta for each salma.37 It has been argued that Martin’s decree contributed to the formation of an integrated grain market in Sicily by opening the way for reduced incidences of shortages and more stable prices.38 As the example of Malta demonstrates, however, royal privileges could lose much of their effect if they fell into disuse (as the Maltese claimed) or were not reconfirmed or firmly enforced. It is not known whether Ferdinand acceded to the Maltese request, but any trade privileges granted would have been lost from 1421 to 1428, when Malta and Gozo were pawned to the Aragonese nobleman Gonsalvo Monroy and so were not part of the demesne.39 Alfonso granted another exemption from payment of export licenses on grain and other victuals in 1432, following the reincorporation of the islands into the demesne, yet other requests to reconfirm this privilege recur in 1435 and 1450.40 35
Del Treppo, I mercanti, 166-7, 172, 174-5. The exchange of Catalan cloth and foodstuffs for Maltese grain by a Catalan merchant company in the 1450s and 1460s is difficult to explain: Del Treppo, I mercanti, 176. 36 Epstein, An Island for Itself, 141. 37 Giambruno and Genuardi, Capitoli, 376. 38 Epstein, An Island for Itself, 141-50. 39 G. Wettinger, “The Pawning of Malta to Monroy,” Melita Historica 7 (3) (1978): 265-83. 40 Giambruno and Genuardi, Capitoli, 390.
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Even when trading privileges were in force, the Maltese continued to experience difficulties procuring grain, either because of the intransigence or corruption of port officials who refused to honor toll exemptions or because towns in Sicily were unwilling to allow sales of grain for fear that they themselves might experience shortages.41 Small towns or isolated communities may have been especially vulnerable because they could not easily make their voice heard, which perhaps explains why the capitoli (petitions) of the universitas of the island of Lipari contained complaints similar to those by the Maltese.42 In 1483, in spite of an order from the viceroy, the authorities in Licata refused to sell wheat to Malta, and in 1507 Maltese who wished to buy grain from Terranova were allegedly being forced to pay bribes to customs officials or risk imprisonment.43 Similar protests were made in 1513 and 1515 against other port authorities.44 Times of scarcity only compounded the usual difficulties. In 1483 the port official of Licata asked the Maltese authorities not to buy all their grain from his city but to extend their search to other ports, particularly during the summer months when the weather was favorable to longer voyages.45 In fact by 1515, Malta appears to have been buying grain from several caricatori including Agrigento, Sciacca, Mazara, Licata, and Heraclea.46 In difficult circumstances the universitas sometimes adopted harsh measures such as requiring those who held stocks of grain to sell it immediately,47 to conduct searches to reveal hoarded supplies,48 or to institute forced loans upon all or some members of the community with which the universi-
41
Wettinger, Acta Iuratorum, § 517. Giambruno and Genuardi, Capitoli, 366-7, 371. 43 Wettinger, Acta Iuratorum, § 927; J. Del Amo García, S. Fiorini, and G. Wettinger, ed., Documents of the Maltese Universitas. No. 1. Cathedral Museum, Mdina. Archivum Cathedralis Melitae, Miscellanea 33, 1405-1524. Documentary Sources of Maltese History (Malta: Malta University Press, 2001), § 84. 44 Del Amo García, Fiorini, and Wettinger, Documents, § 96, § 101. 45 Del Amo García, Fiorini, and Wettinger, Documents, § 45. 46 Del Amo García, Fiorini, and Wettinger, Documents, § 101. 47 Wettinger, Acta Iuratorum, § 73 (1456); §215 (1462); §279 (1468). 48 Wettinger, Acta Iuratorum, § 125 (1461); § 216 (1462). On the cherca, Bresc, Un monde, 745. Some people made their own private arrangements to purchase grain in Sicily. Wettinger, Acta Iuratorum, § 314 (1468): “si faza la cherca di quilli ki hannu portatu frumentu et si l’annu portatu per usu so si pigla parti per vindiri a lu populu.” 42
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tas could purchase grain (inpronti).49 If the situation was deemed to be especially critical, the universitas authorized the seizure of ships carrying grain to other destinations and confiscated their cargo.50 IV In conclusion, I would like to remark on two implications which can be derived from this study. First, it is admittedly notoriously difficult, but nonetheless important, to assess the effect of commercialization on a local level. I suggest that the extent to which urban demand in the late Middle Ages was responsible for opening commodity markets and lowering the costs of trade was in part limited by conflicts of interests within and among individual towns. Even in a relatively commercialized society like late medieval Sicily, towns and urban elites were often more concerned with protecting their particular fiscal and commercial privileges than in reducing the cost of regional trade. As John Hatcher and Mark Bailey have recently noted: legal controls over trade in the Middle Ages were not intended to secure cheap and ready participation for as many as possible. Rather their object was to extend and protect the control of commercial activity ... for the profit of a few beneficiaries, and this inevitably restricted the scale of any reduction in the transaction costs of marketing for most producers.51
Second, I believe that the evidence presented above confirms the view that economic intervention by the medieval state generally came in spurts and its effect was, at best, unevenly distributed. When stategranted economic privileges were reasonably respected or enforced, they may have indeed contributed to a reduction of institutional constraints on trade and promoted regional specialization and greater market integration. However, the Maltese evidence shows that there were also several instances where, in practice, this did not occur. Malta’s alienation from the demesne between 1421 and 1428—by no means a unique event among demesnal cities in the 49 Wettinger, Acta Iuratorum, § 25 (undated); §197 (1462); §218 (1462) (forced loan of 1000 florins on “persuni facultusi”). 50 Wettinger, Acta Iuratorum, § 547; § 548; § 549. 51 Hatcher and Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages, 168.
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kingdom of Sicily—stands as a reminder that, for the state, the benefits of short term gains might outweigh long-term expectations.
COMMERCIAL CREDIT AND CENTRAL PLACE FUNCTION IN THIRTEENTH-CENTURY YPRES David Nicholas
Of the five great cities of Flanders (Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, Lille, Douai) in the late thirteenth century Ypres was the last to develop urban characteristics, the most precocious in record-keeping, the most industrial, and the most involved in trade at the interregional fairs. Its cloth was the most highly taxed of any Flemish textiles at the fairs of Provins, and the city maintained its own houses for merchant lodging at Provins and Lagny.1 The decline of the textile industry of Ypres in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is well known.2 The extent to which the decline of the Champagne fairs was involved in the general decay of Ypres’ prosperity, either as cause or effect, must remain an open question.3 Indeed, most questions concerning Ypres must remain open, because the archives of the city, once the richest of Flanders, were destroyed in 1914. Before the war the city archivist, Guillaume Des Marez, published the city accounts from 1267 to 13294 and took extensive notes on the more than seven thousand chirographs, including 5,505 debt recognitions, that were contracted before the échevins of the city from 1 October 1249 to 18 June 1291, when the 1 Elizabeth Chapin, Les villes de foires de Champagne des origins au début du XIVe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1937), 96, 109, 115, 118. 2 See particularly Hans Van Werveke, De omvang van de Ieperse lakenproductie in de veertiende eeuw, Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Klasse der Letteren, no. 9 (Antwerp: Standaard, 1947). 3 John Munro has argued persuasively that the eclipse of the Champagne fairs was due to a decline in the production of light woollens that had been the most important element in their prosperity. He links the change also to the rise in transaction costs with the onset of wars in the 1290s. John H. Munro, “The ‘New Institutional Economics’ and the Changing Fortunes of Fairs in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: the Textile Trades, Warfare, and Transaction Costs,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 88 (2001): 1-47, at 14-9. 4 Guillaume Des Marez and E. De Sagher, eds., Comptes de la ville d’Ypres de 1267 à 1329, 2 vols. (Brussels: Commission Royale d’Histoire, 1909-1913).
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THRESHOLDS FOR MARKET INTEGRATION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES AND ENGLAND IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY Richard W. Unger
England, Flanders, Brabant, and Holland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while showing signs of economic growth and a remarkable ability to adjust to changing demographic, environmental and political circumstances, did not indicate a reliance on long distance trade or even intra-European trade that would be typical of the following two centuries. More stable political conditions allowing a revival in overland trade to Germany and Italy along with expansion of shipping were the foundation for subsequent growth in industrial production and in commerce.1 But for much of the two centuries before 1500 it appears that the participation of the towns around the southern North Sea in exchange, in extending the scope of their trade, and in integrating their markets with those of other towns changed little and perhaps even declined. Southeastern England, which largely meant London, and Flanders were the most urbanized parts of northern Europe. With the exception of Paris, virtually all sizeable fifteenth-century cities north of Italy could be found in the region. Towns were net consumers of people: Death rates were higher than birth rates. Even more dramatically they were net consumers of food. Urban dwellers kept animals and had gardens. Some food production within town walls was to be a common feature of European cities into the nineteenth century. But for the principal source of nutrition of pre-modern 1
See among other works by John H. A. Munro, “The ‘New Institutional Economics’ and the Changing Fortunes of Fairs in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Textile Trades, Warfare, and Transaction Costs,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 88 (1) (2001): 20-8. His emphasis is on the fall in transaction costs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the rise of fairs in the Low Countries. See also John H. A. Munro, “English ‘Backwardness’ and Financial Innovations in Commerce with the Low Countries, 14th to 16th Centuries,” in Peter Stabel, Bruno Blondé, and Anke Greve, eds., International Trade in the Low Countries (14th-16th Centuries) Merchants, Organisation, Infrastructure (Leuven: Garant, 2000), 105-67.
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people in northern Europe, bread, people in cities had to import the raw material. Cities were sumps for food grains, sucking wheat and rye, barley and oats, from the countryside. Towns were a force for promoting and generating trade and exchange. The size of towns around the southern North Sea and their need for food grains would suggest a need for trade, a force for creating conditions conducive to an economy based on shipping and commerce. It appears that, surprisingly, that was not the case in the fifteenth century. Despite the high degree of urbanization, trade in food grains was limited. The towns of southeastern England and the Low Countries did not rely extensively on grain shipped to them from afar and, in fact, not even grain shipped from relatively nearby. The principal urban markets in northern Europe in the later Middle Ages showed low degrees of market integration with those at any considerable distance away. The towns could function and prosper on the basis of nearby supplies. Few towns reached or surpassed a threshold which forced them to seek food grains from distant points. That seeming anomaly is, however, consistent with theoretical expectations and with the constraints placed on them by the availability of land and by the prevailing technologies of agriculture. Within the Low Countries, and especially the southern Low Countries, in the fifteenth century there was a high and increasing degree of market integration. The process gained momentum in that most densely populated region of northern Europe in the following century giving something of an impression of the inevitability of the process, especially in what was a clearly defined and relatively small region. Scholars examining the grain markets of the region through a variety of statistical tests—that is Marie-Jeanne Tits-Dieuaide2—and the growth of the largest city in sixteenth century Europe—that is Herman Van der Wee—among others, found evidence for the emergence in the fifteenth century of an integrated market or markets in Flanders and Brabant. According to Van der Wee urban markets in Brabant were moving toward integration already well before 1500, a process he said which became
2 Marie-Jeanne Tits-Dieuaide, La formation des prix céréaliers en Brabant et en Flandre au XVe siècle (Brussels: Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1975), 270-5.
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more pronounced over time.3 Both he and Tits-Dieuaide were convinced that a closely related and connected regional market for, at the very least, the southern Low Countries had emerged by 1500. Data from towns in the Netherlands outside of Flanders and Brabant suggest that the process of integration was advanced by then but less so in places like Douai and Utrecht than in Antwerp, Brussels, and Louvain. A standard test for market integration is whether prices tended to converge and to move together.4 Though price movements in the various markets were not always of the same magnitude at exactly the same time, the charting of prices leaves a strong impression of the convergence of prices of the principal food grains, wheat and rye. This suggests slow movement toward integration and within limits.5 In the sixteenth century the same regions became even more integrated among themselves but only then with markets elsewhere in northern Europe. For the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it appears that integration was local and at most regional. Despite the long term outcome, despite the eventual integration of markets throughout northwestern Europe, the final economic result was not inevitable. The grander pattern, called globalization by later writers, may be common in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but by no means was that the only possible outcome in the fifteenth. Then more common it appears was the development of integration in relatively small regions which were themselves in turn connected commercially through new periodic regional fairs that emerged in the period.6 Levels of transactions costs, warfare, and government regulations worked to prevent exchange. Cumula3 Herman Van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), 1: 23-4, 31. 4 See Appendix 1. 5 For a summary of the discussion about Low Countries market integration and further statistical confirmation of a level of regional market integration see Richard W. Unger, “Feeding Low Countries Towns: The Grain Trade in the Fifteenth Century,” Revue Belge de Philolgie et d'Histoire 77 (2) (1999): 32958; Richard W. Unger, “Maritime Transport and the Integration of Low Countries Grain Markets in the Late Middle Ages,” in Piet Van Cruyningen and Erik Thoen, eds., Town and Countryside from the late Middle Ages to the 19th Centuries: Supply and Demand of Food (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, forthcoming). 6 Stephan R. Epstein, “Regional Fairs, Institutional Innovation, and Economic Growth in Late Medieval Europe,” Economic History Review 47 (3) (1994): 459-482.
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tive improvements in agricultural production, including diversification and intensification, worked to make small parts of the region self-sufficient. At the same time swings in production thanks to changing natural conditions and improvements in transportation had the opposite effect. On balance and in the long term it is true that the forces for integration prevailed. At many points in the fifteenth century and for many parts of the region, however, the level of integration with other urban markets was scant. Many of the towns of the region only infrequently searched outside of the lands nearby for sources of food grains. Measures of market integration indicate the limited degree of reliance on distant markets and the limited scope of integration in the region. Data on potential food grain production indicate why towns could and did get by in many if not most years on what local farmers grew in the fields around the towns. If prices moved up and down together, to be expected of two markets that are integrated, then price series from the two markets for the same good should be highly correlated. Where levels of correlation were high that indicates that when a food grain was in short supply consumers turned to sources of the good in other markets. In the fifteenth century in England and the Low Countries correlations of prices of different food grains in the same market were even higher than correlations of prices between markets. That indicates that when a good grain was in short supply consumers turned to other grains in the same market. To test the degree to which consumers moved not to distant sources for the same food grain but shifted to different grains in their own market prevailing prices were compared inside single markets. Comparisons were made using the currency prevailing in that market, thus avoiding problems created by the changing values of currencies. Corrections were made for differences in and changes in the units of measure, that is either by weight or volume depending on the practice of the individual market. There was a hierarchy of food grains in late medieval markets. Consumers preferred wheat almost invariably. Wheat prices were higher per unit volume always. Because of the higher price wheat was better able to cover transport costs and so was more likely to be exchanged across markets. The demand for wheat was more susceptible to changes in the income of consumers. The wealthy bought wheaten bread and the not so wealthy bought it when they
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could afford it. A fall in the price of wheat drew more consumers into the market for the good. If wheat was, relatively, a luxury good then oats was at the other end of the spectrum. It was not just the lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson who thought oats were intended for horses.7 In the Middle Ages the grain was used as animal feed but was also used for bread, porridge and, in the Low Countries especially, it was used extensively in brewing.8 So people did eat oats but it came at the bottom of the list among choices. It was an inferior good in that presumably a fall in price would have led to no increase in consumption as people used the income released by the lower cost of oats to buy something else, such as wheat or more likely rye, the next grain up the ladder of preference from oats. Rye was like oats and for both consumption was price inelastic, that is if prices changed consumption levels changed little. Those grains were so necessary to the diet of the poor that people simply had to buy them even when prices are up sharply. Barley was not in the same class as wheat which was alone at the top of the grain hierarchy but barley was probably ahead of rye because of its use in quality beer. That seems to have been especially true in England in the later Middle Ages. If farmers and merchants and shippers preferred to trade wheat over other grains then wheat prices should have been more highly correlated with prices in other markets. The market for wheat should have been larger, more integrated and integrated earlier than those for inferior grains like rye or oats. The expectation is that the price of a traded grain would have had a high correlation with prices in other markets and much less of a correlation with prices of other grains in the same market. If no grains were traded then prices would have been determined solely by local conditions. If neither wheat nor oats nor barley nor rye was exchanged under such conditions of autarky the price movement of all grains would have been much the same, the only variation being small and
7
“Oats. A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” (Samuel Johnson, A dictionary of the English language: in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers: to which are prefixed a history of the language and an English grammar (London: W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton etc., 1755), II). 8 See Richard W. Unger, A History of Brewing in Holland 900-1900. Economy, Technology and the State (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001), 116-20.
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caused by differences in the characteristics of demand for the different food grains. To put it another way if grains were traded there should have been high correlation among the prices for the same grains in different markets and if grains were not traded then there should be high correlations for different grains in each local market. Using price series starting in the late fourteenth century and running down to 1600, that is well into the era of greater market integration in the sixteenth century, if there is one thing that leaps out from an examination of the correlation of grain prices within markets it is the consistently high—indeed staggeringly high—levels of correlation. For sites with surviving lengthy price series for the four principal food grains, that is Antwerp, Leiden, and southern England the coefficients of correlation are almost always above 0.800 (Table 1).9 What is more the relationship between oats and wheat, where the lowest level of correlation would be expected given the position of the two grains at either end of the hierarchy of food grains, is among the highest and not the lowest. The somewhat lower levels of correlation of barley and oats prices with rye prices in Leiden could easily be a result of the relatively smaller sample size. It is almost as if any two grains were complementary goods, like left and right shoes, but of course food grains were not complements. For Utrecht there is only surviving data for three grains, barley, oats and wheat, but correlation of prices was still high, much higher than the norm for prices for the same grain among different markets (Table 2). The relationship between oats and wheat shows the lowest level of correlation but the difference between it and other levels is small. For some markets there are only two surviving price series (Table 3). The results still prove to be similar no matter the grains, no matter the sample size and no matter the location. Going futher afield, Gdansk, the great export centre for Polish grain and in the sixteenth century and beyond a major supplier of food grains to the Low Countries, showed little difference between the performance of rye and wheat prices. The Paris case, also beyond the region around the southern North Sea, offers few observations. As well some extremely high wheat prices in the closing years of the Hundred Years War strongly affect re9
The rye and oats prices from Antwerp are compared to wheat prices from nearby Lier.
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one market are compared to levels in other markets, such as Antwerp (Lier) and Leiden (0.471) or south England with Antwerp (Lier) (0.600). With the same grain price correlations between markets are still low compared to the price correlations between grains in a single market. Oats prices in Antwerp and Leiden were weakly correlated (0.427) as were wheat prices between Bruges and Brussels (0.451). For a comparison of barley and rye prices the results are similar (Table 6). Correlations within Leiden and Antwerp between the two grains were high while comparisons between markets show lower levels of correlation, for example between Antwerp and Louvain (0.460) and Utrecht and Leiden (0.498). For the same grain the correlations between markets are also low. Between Brussels and Amsterdam the correlation of rye prices is actually negative (-.004), admittedly for minute samples. Even with markets close to each other the correlations of the figures for barley and rye are strikingly low, another indication that markets were moderately independent and did not rely on common sources of supply. Price movements for different grains in the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century were highly correlated within markets. The data would seem to indicate much more exchange of food grains within markets than among markets. The levels of correlation within markets are staggering, especially when compared with levels of correlation among markets. Despite some deviations the statement would seem to be true of all grains in all places and at all times and not just in the Low Countries and southeast England but in northwestern Europe in general. Even the sample size does not seem to affect the result. There is the possibility that to some degree the common internal price movements were generated by government price fixing or at least price regulation. Though towns in the Low Countries and especially in the northern Low Countries were less dirigiste than their German counterparts in the sixteenth century the legislation which first appeared in the fifteenth century may have had some bite which would help explain internally consistent prices (Table 7). The correlations in prices for the four principal food grains in Strasbourg are simply too high to be explained by autarky. The hand of the civic government can be seen in the complete consistency of price movement over the years up to 1600. If that is the case then government legislation worked against market integration, kept the mechanism of prices from working to draw supplies from areas of surplus. The towns may already have
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of farmers in feeding towns had limits, however, and so the effectiveness set restrictions, even if somewhat flexible, on the size of those settlements. In dealing with questions of sources of food big cities have been the most popular sites for investigation and not just because the material is easier to muster. For medieval England the study of the maximum size of towns has meant the study of London. The capital did reach an impressive 80,000 souls by around 1300 but cities of that size and larger in northern Europe were more a product of the sixteenth century when political centres like Paris, London, and Amsterdam went through dramatic expansion. Ultimately it was food and fuel supplies that both theoretically and practically constrained the population of towns. To measure the restrictions created by the need to feed urban populations perhaps the simplest way is to return to the world of that early nineteenth-century Pomeranian rye farmer, Johan von Thünen, and to his followers, the German geographer Walter Christaller and the professor who refused a post under National Socialism, August Lösch, to return to that school of German scholars who dealt in what they called the economics of location. They began purely theoretically and then made attempts to adjust their theories to conform more closely to the reality they knew. To make life simple they began by assuming a world that is a flat undifferentiated plain—and in this case two spellings of plane are correct which is the kind of thing that brings relief to students and anxiety to the writers of spell checkers for computer programs. There are additional limiting assumptions, such as that no firm makes abnormal profits and that society maximizes the degree to which firms agglomerate, or in other words minimizes the number of sites of any economic activity. Both transport and production costs, are uniform, demand is infinitely elastic at a given price, and there is a single market centre. With those assumptions then production would logically be distributed evenly and equally across the plain so then central places, sites which provide services to the population, would appear at equal intervals. It turns out that the distribution of those centres of population will be theoretically arranged regularly in a pattern of equilateral hexagons.12 12
J. H. von Thünen, Der isolierte Staat in Beziehung auf Landwirtschaft und Nationalökonomie, 2nd ed. (Rostock: G. B. Leopold, 1842-1850); August Lösch,
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Von Thünen wanted to know the maximum rent a landlord could get from farmland. That would depend he realized on the profits that farmers could generate. So if farmers were trying to maximize their incomes that led him to the question of why farmers picked the specific crops they chose to raise at different locations. Consumers paid for the cost of producing a crop and also for transport costs so at a certain distance away from a consumption centre it was no longer economic to grow one crop but became profitable to grow another. The critical factors for the choice of a crop were then production costs per unit of land and transport costs. Von Thünen envisaged, theoretically, a series of circles around a point of consumption and within each zone described by those circles farmers producing one crop or type of crop. Christaller, starting with the same set of assumptions, examined the geometry asking what would be the optimum shape of the zones of production. There is no doubt that the circle was the most efficient choice but a series of circles around each centre of consumption would not fill up the entire plain. The collection of polygons that would fulfill that necessary function of blanketing the plain are the triangle, square and hexagon. Since the hexagon is the closest to the circle in shape, intuitively and also mathematically it is the best choice to describe regions of production for maximizing efficiency of supply. The hexagon turns out to be four-fifths as efficient as a circle for the purpose. In a sense Christaller was trying to make more general the specific case that von Thünen had described. Lösch went further in trying to loosen the rather strict assumptions of the essential theory. Von Thünen himself tried to relax the obviously inaccurate assumption that the world is a flat undifferentiated plain. He did consider what happened if for example a river ran through the plain, thus creating a range of lower transport costs.13 In general just as waterways lower transport costs hills increase them. The plain is finite in extent and at some point reaches what is a much more undifferentiated surface, that is the sea. By accepting variations in geography and so a lack of uniformity in production but, more important, in transport costs the neat The Economics of Location, trans. Wolfgang F. Stolper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 109-20. 13 Alan G. Wilson, Complex Spatial Systems: The Modelling Foundations of Urban and Regional Analysis (Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education, 2000), 51-4, 81-2, 123-5, 135-8.
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pattern of hexagons becomes skewed. By accepting that geography could be different the theorists also accepted that production costs could vary because of soil type and weather conditions.14 The smaller the area under consideration, however, the more likely the pattern of supply would conform to the theoretically anticipated pattern of regular hexagons. In the second half of the twentieth century, armed with more sophisticated mathematics and computers to do iterative calculations at high speed, theorists have added a dynamism to the static models of Lösch and his predecessors. The resulting spatial interaction modelling can with some ease consider the reciprocal relationships of multiple centres of consumption, the flows between them, and allow for variations in geography. The resulting models are more complex with von Thünen’s world of rings reduced to a special highly restricted case. They are highly flexible, and able to accommodate a wide variety of variables and so better able to deal with known circumstances. The geometrical patterns around multiple centres are varied and show a great potential variety in land use (Figure 1). Yet in dealing with a single centre and even incorporating an interaction-location paradigm, though the geometrical form takes on more of an elliptical shape the further away from the centre (Figure 2), still the shape, at least in the first zone closest to the centre, is similar to the regular hexagon which satisfied Christaller.15 According to Wilson, ... Christaller’s system is too rigid to have any chance of representing reality ... However, it should be emphasised that the theory is an outstanding creation, offering great insights—rather in the manner of many economic concepts and theories which are accepted on such a basis without ever having a chance of representing reality in any detailed respect.16
While the criticism of location theory as it emerged in the first half of the twentieth century is certainly well established and acknowl14
On differences in agricultural output depending on differences in weather patterns see Christian Pfister, “Climate and Economy in Eighteenth Century Switzerland,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1978): 719-23. 15 Wilson, Complex Spatial Systems, 81-4, 93. 16 Wilson, Complex Spatial Systems, 146.
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Figure 1
Von Thünen Rings with an Interaction Model (Alan G. Wilson, Complex Spatial Systems: The Modelling Foundations of Urban and Regional Analysis (Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Ltd., 2000), 83)
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Figure 2 A Von Thünen System with Multiple Market Centres (Alan G. Wilson, Complex Spatial Systems: The Modelling Foundations of Urban and Regional Analysis (Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Ltd., 2000), 83)
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edged as sound, and while the addition of dynamical locational analysis shows how exceptional were the cases described by earlier theorists, the expectations which had their origins in the work of von Thünen can still serve as both a guide to patterns of production and land use, and also as a basis for an understanding of the historical relationship between the agrarian countryside and the sites farmers supplied with food. Each person who lives in the central place requires the labour of people producing food within the hexagon around the consumption centre, that is around the central place. The surplus created by the farmer will determine the land area required to support each resident of the central place. That in turn means that the amount of land it took to feed a town depended on how much land it took to feed a person. For the late Middle Ages, using figures generated by Christopher Dyer from the end of the thirteenth century, with gross yields of around 1,000 litres per hectare for many food grains and after deductions for seed, feed for animals, food for the farmer’s family, and for tithes, the net figure for marketable grain was between 160 and 220 litres per hectare. Another estimate for the early fourteenth century by James Galloway and Margaret Murphy puts the average marketable surplus at 360 litres per hectare for wheat. There was wide variation of course but something like 300 litres net per hectare for wheat and oats and 400 litres net for barley seem reasonable for late medieval England.17 If per caput annual consumption of food grains was about 600 litres, an estimate which is not unreasonable and reflects neither a poor nor a prosperous standard of living, then it took around two hectares of farmland, more or less, to support a town dweller. That assumes that the entire rural population was involved solely in production of food for market. That was of course not true and became less true in the late fourteenth and fifteenth century with expansion in rural industry. If for every farmer in the countryside there was one dependent person who consumed rather 17 Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages Social Change in England c. 1200-1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1113; James A. Galloway, “London’s Grain Supply: Changes in Production, Distribution and Consumption during the Fourteenth Century,” Franco-British Studies 20 (1995): 27; James A. Galloway and Margaret Murphy, “Feeding the City: Medieval London and its Agrarian Hinterland,” The London Journal 16 (1) (1991): 11.
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than produced food then the land area needed to feed one urban dweller was around four hectares, and that estimate probably is a high one. As to fuel, though in some parts of England coal was known and used in the late Middle Ages, for the overwhelming majority of the population heat came from firewood. Around 1300 coal cost four times as much in London as it did in Durham so even though coal had higher calorific value—more than double that of wood—other than for industrial uses, firewood was the logical source of home heat.18 Von Thünen expected that forested areas near cities would be retained and managed to produce heating supplies and that certainly did happen in southeast England, in regions near London. Attempts to estimate the land area needed to supply people in towns with fuel are even more plagued by problems than the attempts to estimate the land area needed to supply food grains. Firewood consumption varied with the climate. Firewood production varied with the character of the land and the level of organization and management in exploiting the land.19 One authority offers a figure for Sweden and Finland of eight kilograms of firewood per person per day as the consumption norm, including industrial uses, but in northern France, Germany, the Netherlands, and England the estimate is about four kilograms per day. Four kilograms per day translates into about 1.5 tonnes annually and assuming a level of the average productivity of forests of between 0.75 and 1.5 tonnes per annum it would have taken from 0.5 to 1.0 hectares of managed woodland to produce that much firewood and so meet the needs of the average inhabitant of a town.20 Presumably the demand for firewood per caput was on the rise in late medieval England because of the spread of the use of the chimney. Production figures reported by Galloway, Keene, and Murphy from the woodlands supplying late medieval London suggest output of 2.25 tonnes per hectare, an estimate that is generous. They also esti18 James A. Galloway, Derek Keene, and Margaret Murphy, “Fuelling the City Production and Distribution of Firewood and Fuel in London’s Region, 1290-1400,” Economic History Review 49 (3) (1996): 447-72, at 448. 19 On the management of English forests in general and over the long term see Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London: Dent, 1986). 20 Paolo Malanima, “The Energy Basis for Early Modern Growth, 16501820,” in Maarten Prak, ed., Early Modern Capitalism Economic and Social change in Europe, 1400-1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 53, 61.
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mated per caput wood consumption for the fourteenth century at 0.8 tonnes. At that pace and at the high rate of production they use it took an area of at least 0.35 hectares to supply each Londoner, but that figure errs to the low side. At that level it took about 28,000 hectares in 1300 to meet the needs of the population of 80,000 and only 18,000 hectares in 1400 when the population was considerably reduced. The estimate of 0.35 hectares per Londoner seems low in general but especially because a contemporary in 1700 put the land area required to supply each town dweller with firewood at 0.5 hectares, and that in an era when coal already was making a considerable contribution to the thermal energy needs of the capital.21 So despite the extensive and directed work of Galloway, Keene, and Murphy an estimate of 0.5 hectares as a per caput land requirement for firewood supplies is preferred. People in the countryside would have required firewood as well. The ratios employed for net grain production can and should be applied to estimating rates of firewood output by country dwellers for themselves and city dwellers. Assuming 16 rural people for each urbanite, that is two farm families of four each producing grain for the town dweller and two farm families producing grain for dependents in the countryside, then to supply them would have taken eight hectares of woodland at 0.5 hectares as the land requirement just to supply the 16. It would have taken an additional 0.5 hectares then to meet the needs of a single town dweller. An estimate of something on the order of eight hectares needed to supply enough wood for people in the countryside as well as a single person in town is probably not wide of the mark. Many factors make the figures suspect and the task of lending precision to the estimates for land requirements to sustain townspeople is far from complete. The results may be wide of the mark, and presumably over time more research will sharpen accuracy, still the errors in estimation do serve to some degree to counteract each other. The goal is to produce a general rather than highly specific sense of land use and land requirements to supply town dwellers and so gain some sense of the threshold area required to sustain
21
Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution, trans. Michael Osmann (Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2001). Original German edition published as Der unterirdische Wald (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1982), 55, 66, 91-2. Galloway, Keene, and Murphy, “Fuelling,” 455-6.
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a late medieval town. No matter the efforts at estimation it appears that England’s largest urban centre in the late Middle Ages, London, had its fuel needs easily met by producers in the region, and there was still a surplus for export.22 That along with other indications of regular and consistent access to adequate heating fuel in the Low Countries and England suggests that most of the time most towns did not have trouble with their energy requirements. If it took four hectares of land in total to produce the food needed for a town dweller and eight hectares in total to produce the firewood, for a notional town of 1,000 people—assuming that none of the people in the town did anything to produce any food or fuel for themselves—the total rural area required was 12,000 hectares. If a distribution of production of food grains and firewood for the town of 1,000 conformed to a pattern of regular hexagons—a limiting assumption though as indicated theoretically a reasonable first approximation—then the distance from one side of the hexagon to the other would have been about 12 kilometres. The shortest distance to any of the six sides of the notional hexagon from the centre would have been under six kilometres.23 It was a distance a farmer could walk in an hour with little difficulty. For a town of 10,000 the distance along the any of the six sides of the regular hexagon would have been about 21.5 kilometres. For a city the size of Ghent or Bruges, that is around 40,000, the length of the walk to the outer extremity of the idealized supply zone would have been just short of 43 kilometres, an easy trip in a day on foot. For London at its maximum late medieval population around 1300 of 80,000, and the largest town in the region outside of Paris, the theoretical distance was just short of 61 kilometres. Because of the geometry that distance was not eighty times the distance for a
22
Galloway, Keene, and Murphy, “Fuelling,” 457. The formula for the area of a regular hexagon is A = 3/2 × W2 where W is the smallest width of the hexagon, the length of a straight line from one side to the side directly opposite. If A = 12,000 or 120,000,000 square metres 3 = W2 or W = since 1 hectare = 10,000 square meters then 240,000,000/ 138,564,064 or W = 11,771 metres or just under 12 kilometres as the width of the regular hexagon. The shortest distance from the centre to any one of the sides would thus have been less than 6 kilometres. The area, A, is also 3/2 L2, where L is the length of a side of the regular hexagon. equal to 3 46,189,376 so L= 6,796 metres If A= 120,000,000 square metres then L = or almost 6.8 kilometres. 23
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town of 1,000 but only something more than five times the distance. A careful examination of sources of food for London, the second largest and possibly at some times the largest city in the region, indicates that virtually all the food needed, and so excluding fuel, came from 100,000 hectares, an area in total about twice the size of the small county of Middlesex. It may be that because of the nature of surviving documents research has missed some sources Londoners used for food, for example nearby on the Continent, but whether that is true or not the fact remains that food for the largest city in England came almost entirely from the southeast of England.24 In around 1500, farmers in the coastal Low Countries could supply something on the order of twice as much grain as was needed to feed the existing urban population.25 Even if the estimates to arrive at that conclusion are somewhat suspect and even if the final result is off by as much as 100% still the weight of the evidence strongly supports the impression that for most of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries most grain to feed towns came from close by and so did not have to brought from far afield, that is except in unusual years. Such calculations depend on all the land within the notional polygon being productive and able to supply either food or fuel. But even assuming that only half the land was productive for a town of 10,000 that would have increased the length of the side of the hexagon only to a bit more than 30 kilometres or a distance of a little more than 26 kilometres from the centre to the outer edge of the hexagon, again something that could have easily been covered in half a day by a farmer on foot and with some time to spare. There are many problems with the estimates. There are many exceptions which can and should be raised to the calculations. There are certainly errors. But there is no way to diminish the impression that the land area required to supply a late medieval English town was small by almost any measure. The hexagon did not have to be large—in terms of distance that could be travelled even with the limited equipment and methods available—to meet the needs of the town in either the idealized world of the German location theorists or in the practical world of late medieval townsfolk. That being the case the maximum population of the town was 24 25
Galloway and Murphy, “Feeding,” 11. Unger, “Feeding Low Coutries Towns,” 329-58 at 330-2.
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determined by the limits on the size of the hexagon and the optimal population was suggested by the size of the hexagon. The population threshold, the size of the town which would force reliance on distant supplies of food and fuel was very high because so much of what was needed by urban folk could be raised within a short distance from the town. The area needed to supply a town depended on transport costs. It was not just the presence of food and fuel that mattered but the ability to deliver it to the town at a price which made it worthwhile for countryfolk to produce the goods and to transport them to a central place. Falling transport costs would have made it even easier to supply towns. Estimates of the land needed to produce food and fuel for towns are filled with problems but those pale in comparison to the difficulties with estimates of transport costs. Odd data appear with singular observations never offering more than a glimpse at what it cost to move goods. For example, carrying firewood overland to London in the fourteenth century doubled prices over a distance of some sixteen kilometres but it still paid to bring firewood from as far away as twenty kilometres and even further if shipment was by water.26 To move grain from the Baltic to the Low Countries in the fifteenth century was said to double the price so moving wheat over the few kilometres from producers to urban consumers, even if overland, probably did not present an economic barrier to town size. If the costs of transport went down it certainly made it easier to reach further afield for sources of food and fuel but since the area required to supply towns was as small as it was circumstances rarely required exploiting any gains that might be reaped from falling shipping costs. Two factors seem to have been at work in the late Middle Ages which directly affected the ability of the countryside to get supplies to towns at prices that could sustain the settlements. First, it appears, and appears is the right word, that over short distance by water transport costs went down in the period. If falling transport costs can make a valuable contribution to integrating markets and if in the fourteenth and fifteenth century the most obvious development in commerce was the emergence of regional grain markets
26 Galloway, Keene, and Murphy, “Fuelling,” 457-8; Eli Heckscher, Mercantilism, ed. by E. F. Söderlund, trans. Mendel Shapiro (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955 [revised ed.]), for example 2: 80-9
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then perhaps it was not design improvements in the largest long distance traders that had the greatest impact on the organization of markets and town size but rather changes in smaller ships, vessels used in coastal and river transport.27 River boats are rarely a topic worthy of the time of historians or archeologists. There is little that is grand about them and little reason to examine them when found or to preserve records of them. Yet rivers, even some rather small and insignificant ones, had a central role in inland transport in the late Middle Ages. Getting grain or wood to urban markets very often depended on proximity to a creek or rivulet which ultimately gave access to a major stream. The development of new and more efficient types of coastal and small sailing ships lowered costs. The presence of many river boats and the widespread use of river transport, documented by Jim Masschaele and John Langdon,28 only worked to make moving goods easier and so expand the potential area to supply towns. Second, actions of governments had an effect on the area that might supply urban needs. The failure to maintain order, the established practice of public authorities fighting wars or not stopping people from fighting each other, certainly hurt urbanization. The amount of violence in late medieval northern Europe was limited, sporadic and so the long term effects on optimal town size were less than the new practice of public authorities: regulating commerce. Fears of forestalling and regrating, that is of seeking monopolistic advantages, had generated legislation in English towns already in the thirteenth century. The extent of controls over food supply and the marketing of food in towns expanded in the fifteenth century and became the model for monarchical governments in the sixteenth century.29 Those kings and queens in northern Europe followed patterns of legislation and regulation pioneered by urban governments in Italy. There town populations used political power to gain economic advantage, or at the very least to assure their necessary supplies. Italian towns, especially in Tuscany but to a lesser extent in Lombardy, set up rules and systems of taxation 27
Unger, “Maritime Transport.” John Langdon, “Inland Water Transport in Medieval England,” Journal of Historical Geography 19 (1) (1993): 1-11; James Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England, 1150-1350 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 29 Eli Heckscher, Mercantilism (London: Allen & Unwin, [1935]). 28
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which worked against subject towns and rural areas. Their actions led to relatively large urban centres and inefficiencies that slowed recovery from the mid fourteenth century economic and demographic shock of the Black Death.30 In kingdoms with powerful monarchies, even in the absence of powerful monarchs, such urban legislation was virtually impossible. Richard Britnell has shown that in England nothing like the Italian pattern of legislative control existed and, as a result, nothing like the size of Italian towns was achieved, despite the fact that population densities overall were much the same.31 In the absence of powerful civic governments able to influence market forces and enjoying stable or falling transportation costs English towns in the late Middle Ages had greater flexibility in seeking their sources of food and fuel. In the Low Countries towns found themselves less able than their Italian counterparts to control the flow of goods from the countryside thanks to the power of counts and dukes and to the consolidation of the authority of the Dukes of Burgundy through much of the fifteenth century. There is probably no exact answer to the question of what the optimal size was for a town in late medieval northern Europe. Certainly no final answer is produced by the calculations. At least there is every indication that the answer to the question is probably something like “not very big” and certainly well short of the maximum. In England around 1300 most towns were of medium and smaller size, that is they had populations in the 2,000 to 10,000 range. Only four towns had populations between 10,000 and 80,000 and only one was over 80,000.32 The single giant, London, was an anomaly in England. It had the kind of political power and pull that typified powerful Italian towns. It had access through a river network and through coastal trading to a highly productive agricultural region. It also had relatively easy access to foodstuffs and other goods from not-far-distant productive regions overseas. There is good reason to believe that improvements in transport technology did allow for the optimal size of towns to grow in the late 30 Stephan R. Epstein, “Town and Country: Economy and Institutions in Late Medieval Italy,” Economic History Review 46 (3) (1993): 456-69. 31 Richard Britnell, “The Towns of England and Northern Italy in the Early Fourteenth Century,” Economic History Review 44 (1) (1991): 24-30. 32 Britnell, “The Towns,” 22. The four were Norwich, York, Winchester, and Bristol.
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Middle Ages. That did mean that even though local suppliers could meet needs there might well have been distant suppliers who had the ability to supplant them because the competitors some distance away enjoyed lower production costs. The regular pattern of hexagons was more likely to be disrupted by flows of goods with a different and varied pattern of supply emerging (See the example in figure 2). Even if grain and firewood came from further away that did not mean that lands nearby could not meet urban needs. The region that supplied the town might have an elongated shape with tentacles reaching some distance away but the total area remained more or less the same size, soil productivity and intensity of effort being the factors that led to some variation. By the same token, if most markets got the overwhelming majority of their food almost all of the time from farmers within a very few kilometres of the towns then it does not appear that it was trade and market integration which yielded or pressed for specialization in agricultural production. That would have to wait for larger populations, larger towns and greater concentration of economic activity, all of which became more prevalent in the region in the sixteenth century. Towns could and did thrive in most years under most conditions without having to search far afield for essential supplies. Price data deployed to examine market integration conforms to the expectations of location theory and data for production and consumption of essential goods in the late Middle Ages. Towns relied on suppliers nearby. The threshold, the point at which towns had to look some distance away for supplies, was high. The price data combined with the theoretical framework laid down by von Thünen and his disciples and data on grain production per hectare confirms that intuitive expectation. There was a threshold of size for settlements that set limits to how large the village or town or city could grow before it needed to look beyond the local area for essential supplies to sustain the population. What is perhaps not intuitive is how high that threshold was and how infrequently, even in the densely populated Low Countries and southeastern England, that threshold was breached. Over time the ability to draw on distant supplies might well have and probably did become easier. The constraints on urban growth were most likely reduced but for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it does not appear that towns chose to or needed to look to distant sources for basic goods, that
MARKET INTEGRATION
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is with a few exceptions. It seems that transportation costs did not act as a constraint on town size, either the optimal or the maximum size. It is another case it appears where people in the late Middle Ages did not, contrary to the opinion of the last generation of economic historians, test the technical and economic limits of the world in which they lived.
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APPENDIX I Measuring Market Integration: On the Theory of the Single Price, Sources, Correlations and Variations If markets are integrated the same price should prevail in them, any difference being attributed to the cost of transporting the good between the two markets. The theory of the single price is the basis for measuring market integration. By implication integrated markets should see increases and decreases in prices to the same degree. As prices rise in one traders should move goods from others in order to reap profits, thus lowering prices in the original market to a level consistent with that in all the others. The drive for gain among merchants is the force for price equalization and so for the distribution of benefits and burdens from changes in supply to all people within the scope of the integrated markets. The extent of trade will depend on those traders being informed about prices in the different markets, the cost of transporting goods between and among markets, and the supply of goods available locally to each market. Gauging the integration of European markets from the thirteenth through the sixteenth and even into the eighteenth century depends on the theory of the single price. If two markets are integrated the same price should prevail in both with any difference attributable to differences in transport costs.33 As markets became more integrated the prices in different places tend more and more to move up and down together. The theory is simple enough and what is more a mass of published price data exists both from antiquarians and from the International Commission of Price History whose efforts began in the 1930s.34 In order to make comparisons among cities and to make comparisons over time all prices are standardized to the amount of silver needed to buy a litre of grain. There are serious problems with any such conversions. The advantages, however, in the end outweigh the difficulties. For measures for grain volume towns were generally very strict about regulating the unit of transactions. The goal was to decrease fraud and so increase confidence in the market among both buyers and sellers. The units remained the same over long periods of time.35 In some instances the measure was not of
33
Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan and Company, Limited, 1928), 270-3. 34 Robert Allen and Richard W. Unger, “Allen-Unger Database, European Commodity Prices 1260-1914,” http://www.history.ubc.ca/unger/htm_files/new_ grain.htm, reports many series of grain price data for the period 1250-1914. 35 For example, Monique Mestayer, “Prix du blé et de l’avoine de 1329 à 1793,” Revue du Nord 45 (178) (1963): 163-4.
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volume but of weight which makes conversion necessary. That is done assuming a specific gravity of late medieval grains of 0.8. The silver content of coins changed much more frequently than measures of weight or volume. Official changes at the mint typically do not reflect accurately the amount of silver in all the coins that exchanged in the market place. Old issues circulated frequently as did a variety of coins from other jurisdictions, new and old. There are other problems associated with the use of silver equivalents36 but the error introduced is more than tolerable in order to get the possibility of making comparisons. When dealing with the prices of grains in just one market tests for correlation often involve only the use of the prevailing currency, thus avoiding monetary problems, and correction is made only for differences in and changes in the units of measure To test for integration comparisons are made to see if price changes moved together, that is were the movements correlated, in two or more markets. Such tests can be made for long periods or the time period can be broken down to compare different segments of time. That was an approach taken by Wilhelm Abel, looking at price averages, and by his student, Walter Achilles, examining correlations.37 They did find differences over time and a long term trend toward integration. The gaps between prices in different markets should, in theory, have moved inexorably closer and closer together, the difference reduced by improving transport costs and the movement of goods among markets. Results, however, have not uniformly suggested that inexorable advance.38 Of course it could be that the serious data problems which plague the study of prices may be the cause for the mixed results, but inconsistent market integration remains a more plausible explanation. It may be that the internationalization of markets is what theory predicts and what historians presume existed but in fact the pattern of market development was more complex.
36
Herman Van der Wee, The Growth, 115-122. Wilhelm Abel, Massenarmut und Hungerkrisen im vorinduustriellen Deutschland (Göttingen: Vendenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1972), 38-9, 47; Wilhelm Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, trans. Olive Ordish (London: Methuen and Company, Limited, 1980), 107-9; Walter Achilles, “Getreidepreise und Getreide- handelsbeziehungen europäischer Räume im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” PhD Dissertation, University of Göttingen (1957), 5-10, 33-4, 83-7, 114. 38 Richard W. Unger, “Maritime Transport and the Integration of Low Countries Grain Markets in the Late Middle Ages,” in Piet Van Cruyningen and Erik Thoen, eds., Town and Countryside from the late Middle Ages to the 19th Centuries: Supply and Demand of Food (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, forthcoming). 37
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APPENDIX 2 Sources for Price Data Amsterdam, Leiden and Utrecht: N. W. Posthumus, Inquiry into the History of Prices in Holland, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1946-1964). Antwerp and Lier: Herman Van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963). Brussels and Louvain: Marie-Jeanne Tits-Dieuaide, La Formation des Prix Céréaliers en Brabant et en Flandre au XVe siècle (Brussels: Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1975). Bruges: Charles Verlinden and E. Scholliers, et al., Dokumenten voor de Geschiedenis van Prijzen en Lonen in Vlaanderen en Brabant, 4 vols. (Bruges: De Tempel, 1959-1973), 2: 33-59. Douai: Monique Mestayer, “Prix du blé et de l'avoine de 1329 à 1793,” Revue du Nord 45, (178) (1963): 168-170. Southern England: James E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England From the Year after the Oxford Parliament (1259) to the Commencement of the Continental War (1793), Compiled Entirely from Original and Contemporaneous Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882). Strasbourg: A. C. Hanauer, Études économiques sur l'Alsace ancienne et moderne, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Durand & Pedone-Lauriel, 1876-1878).
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I The long-term stability in gold prices, which characterised European specie markets during the mid-fourteenth century (1325-1375), rested upon the existence of a delicately balanced bi-metallic equilibrium within and between a series of autonomous specie markets. Each maintained the level and composition of its precious metal stock from independent, indigenous supply sources of silver and gold. The first of these, north of the Alps, possessed plentiful supplies of gold emanating from Hungarian mines.3 When this was exchanged against silver initially produced in England (Bere Ferrers, Devon) and Bohemia (Kutná Hora) during the years 1290-1345 and subsequently in Saxony (Freiberg-in-Meissen),4 a stable metallic ratio of 1:10-11.4 was established.5 Further south, two similar autonomous markets existed on the basis of an efficient inter-continental exchange network, facilitating the exchange of African gold for silver from Europe and Asia Minor. Driving directly northward from the Niger Bend across the deserts of the central Sahara, caravans carried gold each year to the refining and minting centres of al-Maghrib al-Aqsa . é , providing the base for an abundant local circulation of “heavy” single and double dinars. Further east, caravans travelling via either Wargla or Ghadames brought similar supplies to Egypt, for minting into those miscellaneous gold pieces that found currency in the lands of the Circassian Sultanate, the regions of the Muslim East, the Hijaz and the Yemen (Map 1).6 Two distinct zones—in the Mahgrib and Egypt—thus emerged, each with cheap and plentiful supplies of gold, which were juxtapositioned against equivalent areas
3
Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting, 3: Chap. 1, §2, 935. Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting, 3: Chap. 1, §1, 927-34. 5 Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting, 3: Chap. 1, §3b, 950-70. 6 Shihaéb al-Díén Abué ’l-Abbaés Ahmad b. Yahya Allaéh al-‘Adawíé . . é b. Fadl . é lik al-amsa al-‘Umaríé, Maésalik al-absa . é r fíé mama . é r, trans. and annot. Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes, 2 vols. (Paris: Bibliothèque des Géographes Arabes, al-Lawaétíé al1927), 2, Bk. 10: 54; Shams al-Díén Abué ‘Abd Allaéh Muhammad . Tanjí é a.k.a Ibn Bat. ttu Rihla or Tuhfat al-nuz. za é ’ib al-amsa é ’ib . . é ta, . . . . é r fíé ghara . é r wa ‘aja al-asfaér, ed. and trans. C. Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti, 4 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1853-1858; reprinted Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Unial-Qazwíéníé, ‘Ajaé’ib alversity, 1994), 4: 376-82; Zakaéríéyaé ibn Muhammad . makhluéqaét wa gharaé’ib al-mawjuédaét, in Yusuf Kamal, ed., Monumenta cartographica Africae et Aegypti, 5 vols. in 16 books (Cairo-Leiden, 1926-1951), 1046. 4
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EGYPTIAN SPECIE MARKETS
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of abundant silver, thereby encouraging an active interchange of the two metals. In the west the profitability of this exchange was such that for half a century trade in goods was subordinated to trade in specie. From 1325-1375 gold doblas (double dinars) regularly passed north bring forth a countervailing supply of European silver southward. In response to these flows a distinctive market structure evolved in the western—Tyrrhenian—basin of the Mediterranean, characterised by a long-term stability in gold prices and an “anticyclonic” distribution of the two metals between the continental littorals. Although relatively scarcer as one moved northward, gold was abundant to customers within a unitary market in which the African product reigned supreme. Nor was the situation significantly different within the eastern zone. Gold arriving in Egypt from alBilaéd al-Suédaén was distributed after minting in a similar market structure receiving small amounts of European silver and larger quantities from the mines of the Isaurian Taurus.7 Within the area spanned by European commercial networks there were thus three distinct and autonomous specie markets. Each of these had a similarly balanced stock of precious metals conforming to a common bi-metallic standard (1:9.4-10.9), and thus, whilst retaining their autonomous character, the markets were united into a homogeneous and unitary system. Unlike in the period 1135-1175, however, in 1336-1375 African gold no longer enjoyed a complete hegemony in the supply of this metal to specie markets within the area spanned by European commercial activity. Yet the existence of an efficient inter-continental trade network, facilitating the exchange of African gold for European or Middle Eastern silver supplies, still ensured bi-metallic exchange stability within and between at least two of the three autonomous specie markets. The unitary “European” system existed, moreover, on terms of bi-metallic parity with another one of similar character, which encompassed the lands bordering the Indian Ocean (Map 2).8 This “Asiatic” specie distribution system was also divided into a series of autonomous elements which, existing in conditions of bi-metallic 7 Ibn Bat. ttu Tuhfat al-nuz. za . é ta, . . . é r, trans. H. A. R. Gibb, Travels in Asia and Africa (London: Hakluyt Society, Second Series, CXVII, 1929), 61-2 436-7. C. Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey. A General Survey of the Material and Spiritual Culture and History, c. 1071-1330 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1968), 160-1. 8 Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting, 3: Chap. 7, §3a-1, 1275-89.
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equilibrium, were conjoined within a unitary system. Here Chinese gold held pride of place, being distributed by Muslim and Chinese merchants through a commercial system that extended from the source of supply to Ormuz on the Persian Gulf and drew a countervailing flow of silver through three distinct points of access. In the west it was Iranian silver, from the Elburz (Reshteh-ye Alborz) mountains (Rayy and Daémghaén), traded through Ormuz, which laid the foundations of a bi-metallic system. Further to the east silver, drawn from the once mighty workings of the Pamir and Hindu Kush, passing through Cambay and Chittagong, played a similar role in the markets of the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. Autonomous yet united by a common bi-metallic standard these markets thus formed a single system, which co-existed with its “European” counterpart, bringing conditions of specie price stability and bi-metallic uniformity to a “world” trading network, divided by religion and politics, but united in its monetary mechanisms.
II From about 1375, however, the first signs of disintegration began to appear in this monolithic edifice. Gold prices began to rise on European markets but not universally (Figures 1-3). Some regions remained able to acquire adequate supplies whilst others suffered acute shortages as the once universal market split into atomistic elements. The primary cause of these changes, as far as northern “European” specie markets were concerned, was rooted in the vicissitudes of indigenous gold production. Until the introduction of Afro-Asiatic techniques of separating gold from auriferous quartz by mercury amalgamation in the 1440s, this was largely confined to small-scale placer workings of European gold bearing gravel. Such placers, during the balmy days of overpopulation and low wages in the early fourteenth century, were thronged with workmen who sustained an annual output of about four tonnes of the yellow metal.9 From about the 1380s, however, a combination of labour shortages and resource
9 M. Malowist, “Problems of the Growth of the National Economy of Central-Eastern Europe in the Late Middle Ages,” Journal of European Economic History 3 (1974): 345.
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depletion caused production to fall to below three tonnes a year, causing producers to cast around for new sources of gold. In the event they lighted upon the exploitation of copper and lead ores containing auriferous silver. Deposits of the former were found in Hungary to the north of Banská Bystrica (Neusohl) but, because of their low metallic content, their exploitation was dependent on a new technology—the Saigerprozess—and a favourable conjuncture of primary metal (copper and silver) prices. Slovak gold production, accordingly, became tied to the fortunes of the silver industry and was most pronounced in the boom conditions—in 1391-1399, 1412-1418 and 1435-1439— affecting that sector. Thus during the 1390s the deposits of argentiferous copper of the Kingdom of Hungary and the Polish lead fields attracted the attention of two Nürnberg corporations—the Kammerer-Seiler and Flextorfer-Zenner—and the Genoese house of Gallici, and until the end of the decade the pickings were rich. Falling copper and silver prices from 1399-1412, however, posed difficulties from which the first German house emerged victorious, thanks to its collaboration with the Venetian and Florentine agents of the Medici.10 From 1412 therefore, secure in the purchase of Polish lead and with control over Hungarian copper supplies, the Italians and Nürnbergers now profited from the boom years 14121418. The Spleiss-Saigerhütten and Hammerwerke established at Neusohl produced some 2,000-2,500 zentners of refined copper and some 8,000-10,000 zentners of unrefined “black” copper, which was exported to Venice together with an indeterminate amount (perhaps 2,500 zentners) sent to Nürnberg. Nor was their contribution to specie markets unimportant. The 900-1,000 tonnes of copper yielded some fifteen tonnes of silver and 140 kg of gold. Hungarian production from auriferous silver thus played a not insignificant role
10
W. von Stromer, “Nürnberger Unternehmer im Karpatenraum. Ein oberdeutsches Buntmetall-Oligopol 1396-1412,” Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej 16 (4) (1968): 641-62; as well as von Stromer, Oberdeutsche Hochfinanz, 1350-1450 (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1970), 119-25, 143-8, 448-95; and von Stromer, “Das Zusammenspiel oberdeutscher und Florentiner Geldleute bei der Finanzierung von König Ruprechts Italienfeldzug, 1401/2,” in Hermann Kellenbenz, ed., Öffentliche Finanzen und privates Kapital im späten Mittelalter und in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Bericht über die 3. Arbeitstagung der Gesellschaft für Sozial- u. Wirtschaftsgeschichte in Mannheim (Forschungen z. Sozial- u. Wirtschaftsgeschichte 16) (Stuttgart, 1971), 50-86.
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in European gold supply during the crisis years of the early fifteenth century. As silver prices rose ever upwards, moreover, its contribution became ever greater, attaining at the beginning of the next boom in the early 1430s an annual output of about 400 kg.11 Yet whilst it made a contribution to the long-term stabilisation of European gold stocks it was an erratic one due to the primary role of silver and copper prices in determining production levels in plant using the new technology. Such was not the case, however, with the other major source of European auriferous silver—the argenta indorata found in the lead ores of Novo Brdo, Serbia. Here the much higher gold content of the silver, amounting to as much as a sixth, made it, at prevailing relative prices, the primary object of exploitation. Production thus moved counter-cyclically to that of Slovakia. Established during the crisis of 1280-1320 the workings were neglected until the gold boom of 1418-1435 when production rose to 6.1 tonnes of silver and 108 kg of gold. With the fall in gold prices after 1435, however, production fell from even this diminutive level, amounting to no more than sixty per cent of its former size in the early 1450s. Table 1 European Gold Production, 1325-1450 (metric tonnes) Date Date 1325-1375 1375-1400 1400-1425 1425-1450
Placer-lode gold (Hungary) 4.0 2.9 3.5 3.7
Auriferous silver (Slovakia & Serbia) — 0.04 0.04 0.36
Gold quartz (Rhineland) — — — 2.0
Totala (a) Total 4.00 2.94 3.54 6.06
Note: (a) Augmented until the late fourteenth century by African gold imports of about 2.0-2.5 tonnes annually.
11 “Und anfänglich bey König Mattyás auch Vladislai Zeiten ist keine Spleyss-Saygerhütten noch Hammer in Neusohl gewesen, sondern man hat den schwarzen Kupfer alsso aus den Land geführet und andersowo gespleissen, geseigert und geschmit,” quoted from the “Memorial of the Fugger’s Factor at Neusohl,” printed in Peter Ratkoš, Dokumenty k baníckemu povstaniu na Slovensku, 1525-1526 (Bratislava: Vydavatemstvo Slovenskej Akadémie Vied, 1957), 457. On the production of copper see Jozef Vlachovicš, Slovenská med’ v 16. a 17. storocší (Bratislava: Vydavatemstvo Slovenskej Akadémie Vied, 1964), 23.
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Together, therefore, the Slovak and Serbian producers exploiting copper and lead ores containing auriferous silver made a small but growing contribution to European gold supply. During the critical years 1375-1425, however, their contribution was slight and as Hungarian placer production declined, so gold prices rose.12 Yet the decline in indigenous supplies was sufficient only to explain some one third of the price increase during the years 1375-1425. Other factors were at work, which were of far greater significance.
III Of primary importance amongst these non-indigenous influences was a fundamental restructuring in the patterns of trans-Saharan trade. As early as the 1390s basic structural changes may already be discerned in the transport network used by merchants. Caravans increasingly avoided the direct routes across the arid dune zones, where nomadic attacks13 and increasing difficulties in securing adequate water supplies rendered the transients’ life precarious. They turned instead to the aqueous gravel at the foot of the Ahaggar and the Adrar des Iforas (Map 2). A major restructuring of the transSaharan trade routes was underway. During the next half- century (1385-1435) this resulted in the emergence of a completely new commercial network within which merchants avoided the dangers of desert transport and sought the greater security of the circumlocuitous way of the Sahel and the central highlands.
12 Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting, 3: Chap. 3, §2b, table 3.3, 1030. 13 Which destroyed the trade entrepôts of Gao in 1454 and Sijilmassa in 1432. The town of Sijilmassa, whose inhabitants had been “very rich and had great traffic with the lands of the negroes” in the fourteenth century, was totally razed in the 1430s. Commercial and minting activity, however, was deflected to castles—Tenegent, Tabuhasin and Mamun—within its territory, all of which were frequented by Jewish and Arab merchants, who continued to grow rich “using great traffic into the lands of the negroes”. These castles, within the territory of the erstwhile town, continued for centuries thereafter to be referred to by both contemporaries and subsequent historians, who drew b. Muhammad al-Wazzaén al-Zayyaétí on their writings, as “Sijilmassa.” Al-Hasan . . .é a.k.a Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, trans. John Pory (1600), ed. R. Brown, 3 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, XCII-XCIV, 1896), 3: 782-6. This practice has been adopted by the writer of this essay.
1360
100
120
140
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2 1400
Figure 4. Price of Gold (1360=100): The Maghrib
1380
1. Mean. Marinid and Hafsid . . Mints 2. Marinid
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1
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The effect of these changes on the supply of gold to North African and Middle Eastern specie markets was dramatic. Within the Mahgrib supplies continued unabated and the price of gold (Figure 4) continued, after a brief dislocation from 1370-1394, to fall to 1435 Yet this stability was achieved only by a basic restructuring of interMahgribi supply networks. The once active Maríénid mints strung out along the western routes of the mid-fourteenth century, after a brief period of debasement from 1373-1394 during which coins became more barbaric in design, ceased minting entirely during the opening decade of the fifteenth century. In their place a new network of Haf sid mints arose, strung out along the new routes which emerged . . during the years 1395-1435. If route reorientation thus ensured intra-regional price stability within the Mahgrib, such was not the case further east in Egypt. Here gold had regularly arrived in the mid-fourteenth century. It passed from either East African sources, or Suakin, or from the Niger Bend by the trans-Saharan via Quseir . Ghadames route, or when this was disrupted, as during the years 1348-1366, via the Mahgrib and the coastal route to Alexandria. Again this had resulted in a steady fall in the price of the yellow metal. With the change in route alignment during the years 1375-1435, however, this was completely changed. Cut off from trans-Saharan supplies, and particularly during the years 1385-1390 and 1399-1412 with little compensation provided by transhipments from the Maghrib, Egyptian markets experienced acute shortages. Gold prices rose (Figure 5) and conditions prevailing in inter-continental exchanges were totally altered. Gold became relatively scarce in relation to both the unit of account and silver. Henceforth, from 1374, rising gold prices attracted gold eastward by enhancing the bi-metallic ratio (Figure 6) relative to those prevailing in Europe. Yet these movements in 1385-1390, 1399-1412 and 1418-1435 created a marked instability in the market. Each rise in gold prices, reflecting stock wastage without compensatory supply increase, resulted in an enhanced bi-metallic ratio, making it attractive to export gold from Europe, the Mahgrib and Asia Minor to Alexandria. Given a lack of indigenous sources of silver, however, each gold boom led to a cessation of silver imports and as stocks diminished, through natural wastage and a reversal of the specie flow, prices rose, lowering the bi-metallic ratio until gold imports ceased and the pattern was reversed. Silver flowed east and as gold stocks di-
100 1360
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Figure 5. Price of Gold and Silver (1360=100): Egypt
1380
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Silver
Gold
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6
8
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Figure 6. Bi-Metallic Ratios
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minished its price increased ... From 1375, therefore, cycle followed cycle and in the absence of compensatory supply inputs, stock wastage took its toll of the metal shuttling back and forth across the Mediterranean, resulting in a gradual enhancement in specie price levels. As both metals steadily increased in price, each upward movement, first in gold and then silver, drew the precious metal east and the depleting stocks raised prices on European markets. The years after 1375 thus saw the emergence of an extended market network, which alternatively channelled gold—in 1385-1390, 1399-1412 and 1418-1432—and silver—in 1374-1384, 1391-1399, 1413-1417 and 1431-1439—east to Alexandria. Each of the major ports of the northern Mediterranean formed a focus within which the impact of this specie trade was proportional to the size of its Levantine commerce. Each gold boom enhanced market prices, each silver boom resulted in an abatement of gold price, the general upward trend being most pronounced in the northern extensions of the supply network. Here disproportionate decreases in stocks, exacerbated by the emergence of a direct gold trade from Central Europe to the Middle East across the steppes of Tartary, led to an abnormally rapid rise in prices.14 As precious metals shuttled back and forth across the Mediterranean in conditions of gradual stock depletion, however, a much more fundamental change was taking place, which totally altered relations between the two trading blocks, a change centred on the years 1392-1412. As already noted, 1392/3 marked the beginning of a phase of rising gold prices on the Egyptian markets. Yet this rise brought forth no compensatory export of gold to Alexandria and European specie markets remained largely unaffected. The reason lay in the emergence of an acute crisis in the Egyptian monetary system.15 Until that date the standard of the whole system was the silver dirham. To the dirham was related gold, the value of which fluctuated with market conditions and in 1392 exchanged at 20 silver dirhams per dinar or mithqaél, and copper, exchanged
14 F. Lütge, Strukturverwandlungen im ostdeutschen und osteuropäischen Fernhandel des 14. bis 16. Jahrhunderts (München: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften—C. H. Beck, 1964), 14-27. 15 Appendix, Numismatic Notes, Section 1.
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by tale at 24 coins of 4.25 grams per silver dirham.16 In such circumstances the rise in gold prices to 26 1/2 dirhams in 1394 and 30 in 1399, shifted the bi-metallic ratio from 9.3-12.3 to 14.1.17 With Genoese and Venetian ratios of 10 and 11.4 respectively, therefore, Venetian exporters were offered potential profits of 7.8 and in 1399 22.8 per cent, which should have resulted in a reverse flow.18 In the event, however, it was not to be. At the low prevailing price of copper (0.25+ ritl . per dirham) it was initially more profitable to take that metal to the mint and receive silver (12.5 per cent).19 The result was obvious. As Maqríézíé later described the situation prevailing during the years 1392-1395: “The Franks carried away the silver dirhams because of the increase in Egypt of the use of copper which they themselves had imported there.”20 In these circumstances the canonical standard collapsed. From 1392 to mid-1395 silver was exported and its price rose rapidly to a level incompatible with the official exchange.21 Accordingly, highgrade dirhams disappeared into hoards or were sold in the bazaars like other precious wares. Dirhams were found being worn as ornaments. Others were used in the manufacture of silver luxury articles
16 W. Popper, Egypt and Syria under the Circassian Sultans, 1382-1468 AD. Systematic Notes to Ibn Taghríé Birdíé’s Chronicles of Egypt, University of California Publications in Semitic Philology 15-16, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955-1957), 43-4, 68; and J. L. Bacharach, “Circassian Monetary Policy: Silver,” Numismatic Chronicle, 7th ser., 11 (1971): 267-8. 17 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 52, 67. The forcing of the exchange to this latter rate, physical punishment being threatened to those who disobeyed, caused great hardship. 18 A. M. Watson, “Back to Gold—and Silver,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 20 (1) (1967): 23-4 (Table 1). 19 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 68; Taqíé al-Díén Ahmad b. ‘Alíé al-Qaédir b. . al-Maqríézíé, al-Mawaé‘iz. wa ’l-i‘tibaér bi dhikr al-khita é thaér known Muhammad . . t. wa’l-a as Khita . t. al-Maqríézíéya, 2: 396.6,15; 397.4, as quoted by Popper, Egypt and Syria, 68. 20 Al-Maqríézíé, Kitaéb al-nuquéd al-qadíémah al-islaémíéya, ed. Anastase-Marie de St.-Élie (Cairo, 1936), quoted from the edition Traité des monnoies musulmanes, trad. A. L. Silvestre de Sacy (Paris: Imprimerie du Magasin Encyclopédique— Fuchs,1797), 47. 21 Al-Maqríézíé, Shudhuér al-‘uquéd fíé dhikr al-nuquéd, ed. P. Anastase-Marie (Cairo, 1939), 62, as quoted in J. L. Bacharach, “Circassian Monetary Policy,” 268; and Olav Gerhard Tychsen (Tuka), Takieddin Al-Makrizii historia monetae arabicae, ex codice Escorialensi cum variis duorum codicum Leidensium lectionibus et excerptis anecdotis nunc primum edita, versa et illustrata (Rostock, 1797), 131.
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such as saddles or vases.22 The effect was to demonetize the classical dirham. In its place debased coins came to dominate the circulating media, which passed by the derogatory nomenclature dirham fulués (copper dirham)—whose silver content reflected market prices.23 With metal stocks doubly depleted by export (1392-1395) and hoarding, prices rocketed upward. In 1397/8 coins of only one third silver content comprised the major element of the circulating media (i.e. half the standard of the canonical dirham) exchanging at a de facto rate of fifteen to one (or a bi-metallic ratio of 7:1).24 In such circumstances the import of copper ceased. That of silver resumed, allowing the restoration of the silver coinage at the price level of 1392, some 30 coins of two-thirds canonical standard being declared equivalent to 20 canonical dirhams and being exchanged against one dinar, thereby establishing a bi-metallic ratio of 9.3:1.25 Yet this stabilisation of silver was only achieved at the expense of the gold coinage. Copper imports from 1392-1395 had prevented the alleviation of the crisis whilst exports of gold 1395-1399 had aggravated the situation. The coinage accordingly deteriorated, heavily worn coins displacing high-grade dinars in circulation, compensated only in 1398 by the first appearance of European gold from Genoa— florins which circulated at a discount in relation to the dinar in circulation (Appendix, Numismatic Notes, Section 2).26 By 1399 a new equilibrium had been achieved between the two metals, exchanging at a bi-metallic ratio of 11.2:1, and between the Egyptian and Venetian currencies, but only at the cost of a 20 per cent depletion of gold stocks. At this point, however, the administration of Yashbak al-Shaé‘baéníé with its financial ghuru Ibrahíém ibn Ghuraéb, which had come to power under the new Sultan Faraj27 determined to defend gold and Al-Maqríézíé/Sacy, Traité des monnoies, 40. Popper, Egypt and Syria, 61. 24 Ahmad b. ‘Alíé al-Qalqashandíé, Subh. al-a‘shaé fíé sinaé‘at al-inshaé, ed. M. A. . Ibrahíém, 14 vols. (Cairo, 1913-1920; reprinted Cairo: al-Mu‘assasa al-Misrí . éya, 1964), 3: 467.3. 25 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 56. 26 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 45-7. 27 Abué al-Maha é suf Ibn Taghríé-Birdíé, al-Nujuém al-za é k Misr . ésin Yu . é hira fíé mulu . wa ’l-Qaéhira, ed. and trans. William Popper, History of Egypt, 1382-1469, Parts 1-7, University of California Publications in Semitic Philology 5-7, 12, 14, 1719, 22 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1915-1960), translation History 2: 2 (Arabic text Nujuém, 6: 3). 22 23
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reform the monetary system, which had been reduced to chaos. A standard of 30 canonical dirhams to one canonical dinar was affirmed,28 establishing a bi-metallic ratio of 14:1, which was more than sufficient to attract European gold and the actual coins in circulation were related to this standard.29 The debased gold and imported coins were set at intrinsic value: the dinar at 24-2530 and the ducat at 26 silver dirhams,31 the “copper dirhams” again at intrinsic value, 1.5 coins exchanging for one silver dirham.32 The effect was dramatic. Gold flooded in. Looking back in 1425 on this period Ibn Taghríé-Birdíé recorded,33 The use of the dinar ifrantíé (ducat) became general in our commerce in the 800s (i.e. 1398-1409) in the principal towns of the world such as Cairo, Fostat, the regions of Syria, the principal lands of the Greeks, the regions of the Muslim East, the Hidjaz, the Yeman, to the point of becoming the current money and the most sought after in commercial transactions.
Without following in detail the vicissitudes of the reform, it must suffice to say that as long as the firm hands of Ibn Ghuraéb and his protégé al-Bíéríé were at the helm gold was successfully defended and the canonical standard reaffirmed. The stability of gold, however, was only achieved through the debilitation of silver. For the population the remedy was more disastrous than the disease. With the raising of the bi-metallic ratio silver not only ceased to flow in but, indeed, in exchange for the inflow of ducats it was exported. As a result of this export and the process of natural wastage, prices rose, reflected in a diminution of the intrinsic value of the dirham fulués. By 1403/4 the fractional currency of white metal was reduced to chaos. Coins of only one fifth the canonical standard were circulating in Cairo, whilst at Alexandria, where the impact of the gold inflow was acutely felt, the nor-
28
Popper, Egypt and Syria, 52. Watson, “Back to Gold,” 27 (Table 2). 30 Ibn Taghríé-Birdíé/Popper, Nujuém/History of Egypt, translation History 2: 51 (Arabic text Nujuém, 6: 69.11); Popper, Egypt and Syria, 53. 31 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 47. 32 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 52. 33 Ibn Taghríé-Birdíé/Popper, Nujuém/History of Egypt, translation History 4: 30 (Arabic text Nujuém, 6: 596.5). 29
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mal coins in circulation contained only half that amount of silver (Appendix, Numismatic Notes, Section 3).34 Nor was the other popular base of the monetary system—copper—immune. The flood of coins entering circulation of the years 1392-1395 came to an end with the de facto rise in silver prices already noted. From 1395, with the cessation of imports, a new age began of “high” copper, because little arrived and merchants exported coin from the country”.35 Prices rose from 4 dirhams per ritl . in 1392 to 41/4 in 1397, 41/2 in 1403, 6 in 1404 and 12 in 1412.36 In response to these changes and the rising price of silver, the actual copper coinage, which continued to pass by tale, was continually lightened as small and worn coins displaced the heavier issues of an earlier age. By 1403/4 the mithqaél-weight (i.e. 4.25 grams) coins had disappeared, replaced by quarter-dirham weight (i.e. 0.74 grams) pieces, which exchanged at 24 to the actual dirham fulués in circulation.37 The popular coinage was in chaos, causing great resentment amongst the population. Whether this contributed to the fall of Yashbak is uncertain, but the opposition party was clearly aware of the tensions in society and the period August 1404 to June 1405 saw a return to the populist policies, which had characterised the sultanate of Faraj’s father.38 In the first month of the new administration the coinage was called down to 100 dirham fulués accepted at their intrinsic value per dinar, representing at Cairo a bi-metallic ratio of 9.3:1, involving the merchant community in great losses and threatening the integrity of gold.39 This populism, however, soon came to an end. In September 1405 Yashbak and Ibn Ghuraéb once more came to power and the primacy of gold was restored.40 Within the year the old standard was Ibn Taghríé-Birdíé/Popper, Nujuém/History of Egypt, translation History 2: 78 (Arabic text Nujuém, 6: 106.5); 2: 84 (6: 115.15), 2: 89 (6: 121.20); Ibn Hajar . al-‘Asqalaéníé, Inbaé’ al-ghumr bi anbaé’ al-‘umr, 3 vols. (Cairo: Majlis al-A‘laé li ’l-Shu‘uén al-Islaémíéyah, 1969-1972), 2: 45, as quoted in J. L. Bacharach, “Circassian Monetary Policy,” 271. 35 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 69. 36 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 69. 37 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 69. 38 Ibn Taghríé-Birdíé/Popper, Nujuém/History of Egypt, translation History 2: 81-2 (Arabic text Nujuém, 6: 111). 39 Ibn Taghríé-Birdíé/Popper, Nujuém/History of Egypt, translation History 2: 84, 89 (Arabic text Nujuém, 6: 115.5, 121.20). 40 Ibn Taghríé-Birdíé/Popper, Nujuém/History of Egypt, translation History 2: 95 34
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re-established and the debilitation of silver continued apace as there was a gradual spread of the Alexandrine coins containing one-tenth silver (Appendix, Numismatic Notes, Section 3).41 Thereafter, month after month, they gained ground. In recognition of the decline in the intrinsic value of the dirham fulués in circulation against the ducat 42 and newly introduced naésirí there was a shift in the . é dinar, exchange rate from 150 in October 1405 to 250 in March 1406, when Ibn Ghuraéb died.43 From the death of Ibn Ghuraéb and the fall of Yashbak, however, there was an increasing reluctance to acknowledge these changes by the new populist administration. As the ten-percent coins thus continued to spread, the de facto exchange rose to 264 in 1410 and 300 in 1412.44 The official rate, however, was frozen at 25045 and the standard maintained, as Maqríézíé explained “by the alteration of the naésirí . é and ifrantíé by those who struck them, the Sultan on the one part and the Venetians on the other.”46 Counterfeit and debased gold thus appeared in 1408, the coins being lightened from their standard of 3.55 grams to 2.94 grams. The system was once more reduced to chaos, reflecting the deplorable state of precious metal stocks, which steadily dwindled from 1392 (Appendix, Numismatic Notes, Section 4). Reform following the death of Faraj once more established the primacy of silver, lowering the bi-metallic exchange within a restructured system to 11.9: 1. This change, however, was overshadowed in the new environment of the 1410s by problems arising from Egyptian monetary stock depletion. The years 1392-1412 witnessed, as a result of the diminution of Egyptian monetary stock, a complete alteration in the purchasing power of specie in terms of commodities within the two trading area, fundamentally altering the nature of trade (Appendix, Section V). European goods became increasingly un-competitive in relation to Levantine rivals as their relative price increased by 40-70 per cent
(Arabic text Nujuém, 6: 131.1). 41 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 54. 42 At its introduction the naésirí . é dinar circulated at a discount of 10 dirhams in relation to the ducat (ifrantíé), Popper, Egypt and Syria, 49. 43 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 63-4; Ibn Taghríé-Birdíé/Popper, Nujuém/History of Egypt, translation History 2: 121, 125 (Arabic text Nujuém, 6: 167.20, 173.8). 44 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 49, 57. 45 Popper, Egypt and Syria, 74. 46 Al-Maqríézíé/Sacy, Traité des monnoies, 59.
EGYPTIAN SPECIE MARKETS
405
in the years after 1412. Trade in specie displaced trade in goods eastwards, fluctuations in bi-metallic ratios merely placing a premium on one metal and then the other in the specie outflow. Moreover, the trade could be highly profitable for, in free market conditions, oriental wares were correspondingly cheaper. Accordingly, the pattern of exchange of specie against specie, which had characterised the years 1374-1412, now from 1412 was displaced by an exchange of specie against goods. How far European merchants benefited from this situation, however, depended on the reaction of indigenous traders to the new market environment. Where the Europeans operated in a competitive environment, as in the market for consumables and raw materials, one finds them buying up the country with alien gold and silver. On the other hand, where they faced an organised group, like the Kaérimíé merchants (tujjaér al-kaérim) in the spice trade, who with the encouragement of the Sultan were capable of a positive response, their position was weaker. Faced with a decline in specie returns for their goods, the Kaérimíé merchants simply restricted supplies of spices. Their first venture in 1412 was overly hasty, their price increase from 60 to 220 dinars per sporta grotesquely overshot the mark and they were left with spices on their hands.47 Within two years, however, they had learnt to manage the monopoly effectively, maintaining domestic prices at about twenty per cent above the level of the 1390s.48 These changes both within the international situation and the Egyptian economy were to have profound effects on the European specie export trade and on those who participated in it. Structurally there was a major displacement in the foci of the rapidly growing trade. For Venice, heavily tied to the spice trade, the ability of the Kaérimíé merchants to maintain the specie price of spices ensured that they gained no advantage from the new situation. Indeed as relative prices in Europe were enhanced by almost two-thirds the trade declined. They reacted by diversifying into unrestricted markets for commodities like cotton and potash (Table 3). Yet this could do little more than maintain a stable outflow of specie from the city, equivalent to 1.5 tonnes of gold annually. 47 E. Ashtor, Levant Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 313 (Table XXIX). 48 Ashtor, Levant Trade, 313 (Table XXIX).
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Tied to the spice trade, the volume of specie exports did not grow, and with a bi-metallic ratio hovering constantly just above that of Egypt to 1433 gold played little role in what outflow there was. In contrast Genoa, which had lagged behind Venice in the boom of 1385-1390 and had been totally ousted from the final stages of the following boom by not having, during the years 1405-1412, a marketable product in the florin, now came to the fore. Its merchants, always more committed to the bulk commodity trade, took full advantage of the new market situation. Tapping a constantly widening market in Egypt their commodity export trade from there grew rapidly, engendering a corresponding import trade in specie from Europe. Moreover, with a bi-metallic ratio that constantly remained below that of Egypt, each gold boom registered significantly in the market place. Genoa had become the motor of Europe. Tapping specie supplies from the European heartland as well as Spain and the Mahgrib, it channelled specie east in return for a burgeoning volume of bulk commodities. The Genoese market was transformed: the slow rise, which had characterised gold prices in the period when metals had shuttled back and forth in conditions of gradual stock depletion, gave way to a rapid increase as the metal outflow grew without any compensatory reciprocal flow. A burgeoning gold export trade, increasing from about a third of a tonne net annually during the last quarter of the fourteenth century to 1.89 tonnes from 1400-1425 and perhaps as much as 4.5 tonnes annually from 1425-1432, as a result of Egyptian monetary disorders, denuded European gold stocks. Eclipsing the effects of the mining crisis of 1375-1400, the specie outflow became the principal cause of the gold crisis during the years 1400-1432. Only with the fall in gold prices, concomitant upon the establishment in the 1440s of mercury-amalgamation gold production in the Rhineland, and the increase in silver prices as a result of the mining crisis, did the specie outflow come to end. Bi-metallic equilibration between the two trading blocs allowed a resumption of commodity trades.
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V. Value of Gold, cont'd Gold Gold Canonical Naésirí . é Dinar Dinar M O March 1418
280 250230
Silver Silver Ducat M
230
Jan 1422
240
Notes:
Half-Mu’ayyadíé Dirham E V
260 220230
Sept 1418 Jan 1421
O
Bi-metallic Ratio
210
30
7
6.69
220
22
10
8.00
210
(a) Related in this year and until 1416 to the dinar-mithqaél. (b) Related after mid-1416 to ducat-florin.
Sources: E. Ashtor, “Études sur le système monétaire des Mamlouks circassiens,” Israel Oriental Studies 6 (1976): 268-70 (Table 2); Popper, Egypt and Syria, 74-5.
FROM VENICE TO THE TUAT: TRANS-SAHARAN COPPER TRADE AND FRANCESCO DI MARCO DATINI OF PRATO1 Martin Malcolm Elbl
From 1394 to 1410, the well-known Tuscan merchant firm of Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato both watched and participated in the traffic of Venetian-supplied copper through the Balearic Islands to 2 From Honein, in the Maghribi ports of Honein and Ghas. sa . é s. sa. . particular, the metal then moved south to the oasis of Tuat, en route to the Western Sudan. Pending further discoveries in the Datini archive, Tuat seems to have been the southernmost point in the Sahara with which Datini agents in Majorca were explicitly albeit indirectly familiar. Their indirect knowledge was mediated through contact with Majorcan Jewish merchants involved in the caravan
1 Offered to John Munro, mentor and a lasting source of inspiration, upon his retirement. My ongoing research on the Datini firm owes much to the impetus of his graduate seminars and his numerous works. The topic aims to honor John Munro’s place on the Scientific Committee of the Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “F. Datini” in Prato. 2 Honein (Ar. Hunayn; commonly gazetteered as Honaïne; JOG NI30-03; lat. 35.16 N, lon. 1.65 W): port formerly located northeast of modern Nemours, in Honein Bay (Marsa Honaïne, between Cape Noé and Marsa Agla), known to the Europeans as at the mouth of Oued Honaïne. Ghas. sa . é s. sa, . Alcudia (Khassaça, Iguesasen, also al-Qudia al-baida . é ’ = the White Hill) is not to be confused with Alcudia in Majorca. The port was located in Ghas. sa . é s. sa . Bay (still known to World War II Mediterranean coastal pilots as Cala de Cazaza, mod. Marsa de Sidi Lahsen, west shore of Cabo de Tres Forcas [Cap de Trois Fourches], east of the prominent vertical cliffs of Punta Negri. See e.g. North Africa, 1:250,000, Edition 1-AMS, JOG NI30-02 (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1954 -). The port is shown more or less correctly in many late medieval portulan charts (very well visible in BM MS Egerton 2803, Plate X of the Atlas of Portolan Charts, ed. E. L. Stevenson (New York, 1911)); also in the Fra Mauro map (c. 1450), in R. Almagià, ed., Monumenta Cartographica Vaticana, 1, Planisferi, carte nautiche e affini dal secolo XIV al XVIII (Vatican: Città del Vaticano, 1944 –), Plates XIII-XV, as Larcildia; and in many others, all the way back to the Carignano planisphere (c. 1320), Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Portolani (as Alcudia).
412
MARTIN MALCOLM ELBL
trade, several of whom resided in or originated from Honein. Far from a mere oddity, however, this extension of the firm’s conceptual map possessed direct relevance, given the exposure of the Datini branch in Majorca to copper trade vicissitudes traceable as far as the Tuat. At first a mere observer, the Majorca branch took its first serious plunge in the copper trade in 1398. The involvement gradually escalated to a complex set of transactions, undertaken in 1407-1408 partly on behalf of the mother firm and its contacts and partly in conjunction with a diversified group of Balearic merchants, Christian, Jewish, and converso. The venture’s disastrous outcome, even though accidental, upset the Majorcan copper market for many months and repercussions were felt from Valencia to Venice. Undeterred, the Majorca branch nonetheless maintained interest in exports of copper to Honein as late as August through September 1410, a period straddling Francesco Datini’s last illness, his death on 16 August, and the firm’s legal dissolution. The substantive Datini evidence predates by some fifty years the notorious but far less richly contextualized voyage to the Tuat by the Genoese Antonio Malfante in 1447, still commonly cited as “the first Italian commercial venture in the Sahara.”3 Given the dates (c. 1390-1410), the geography (a Venice-MajorcaHonein-Tuat artery), and the commodity (copper), it is practically indispensable to set this trade flow in the context of Prof. Ian Blanchard’s recent cyclical intercontinental models of medieval trade in metals and other commodities, some aspects of which remain as yet unpublished but circulate in digital manuscript.4 The Majorcan 3 R. H. Rainero, “La prima iniziativa commerciale italiana nel Sahara: Antonio Malfante nel Tuat nel 1447,” Universo (Florence), 64 (5) (1984): 556-69. For Malfante’s letter from the Tuat, addressed to Giovanni Marione, see G. R. Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto (London, 1937), 86. 4 Ian Blanchard, “The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, c. 1320-1520: A Study of Environmental Change and Commercial Adaptation,” paper presented at the conference Slavery, Freedom and Unfreedom in the Middle Ages, University of Nottingham, 23 April 2005; Ian Blanchard, “The Medieval World of Islam: An Economic and Environmental Analysis,” paper presented at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2001; Ian Blanchard, “Egyptian Specie Markets and the International Gold Crisis of the Fifteenth Century,” in the present publication, 383-410. The arguments are also reflected in the third volume of Blanchard’s Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Ages, Vol. 3, Continuing Afro-European Supremacy (African Gold Production and the Second and Third European Silver Production Long Cycles) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005), Part 3,
COPPER TRADE AND FRANCESCO DATINI
413
copper trade is indeed of some relevance to supporting, adjusting or correcting (as the case might be) those portions of the models that cover the Western Mediterranean and the West-Central Sahara desert around 1400. Blanchard has generally posited 1375 as the starting point of troubles in the distinctive Western Mediterranean market structure that since c. 1325 had arguably witnessed an adequate flow of gold in the form of double dinars (doblas) from the Maghrib to Europe, eliciting a countervailing southbound supply of European silver. Around the same time the trans-Saharan caravans ceased to enjoy a roughly simultaneous benign climatic cycle. As Blanchard has argued, the latter’s lower temperatures and higher precipitation promoted prosperity among nomad populations, relative safety and stability along the desert margins, and the use of trails crossing the West-Central Sahara through fairly difficult dune and sand sea (erg) regions, particularly between the Tafilalt (Sijilmassa), the Tuat, and Walata. From the 1390s, however, increasing aridity and the related upheavals among desert dwellers contributed to a major shift in trade routes. The latter swung to take advantage, among other, of “aqueous gravel at the foot of the Ahaggar and the Adrar des Iforas”5 (in this case the strip of Tanezruft routes from Tuat to the eastern Niger Bend). The trail realignment was largely completed by 1435, and endured throughout the arid phase stretching from about 1420 to 1470. The 1375-1435 shift was accompanied by a “basic restructuring of inter-Maghrebian [precious metal] supply networks” reflecting changes in the flow of gold and thus presumably also other articles of trans-Saharan trade. Marínid mints in Morocco ceased operating sid mints in the first decade of the fifteenth century, while the Haf . . of Ifriqíya in the east rose to prominence. European maritime trade in the Western Mediterranean followed suit, shifting away from the sid western Maghrib to focus more on Ifriqíya, from where Haf . . double dinars passed north “in exchange for European silver”. Related mechanisms lying outside the scope of this paper contributed to a relative isolation of Egypt from African sources of gold, acute shortages of gold on the Egyptian market, and the emergence
“Base Metal Production and Trade: Lead, Tin and Copper.” 5 Blanchard, “Slave Trade,” 12; “Medieval World of Islam,” 32-33; “Egyptian Specie Markets,” 338.
414
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of alternating money-pump flows channelling respectively gold and silver from Europe and Asia Minor to Egypt. The corresponding vagaries of the Egyptian monetary system—silver, gold, and copper—were partly reflected in the pattern of Egyptian copper imports.6 Certain difficulties, however, beset Blanchard’s macro-models with respect to Western Mediterranean and Maghribi commerce and, specifically, the West-Central Saharan caravan traffic. Firstly, the Maghrib is all too often treated as an unproblematic trade membrane between Europe on the one hand and the Sahara and subSaharan Africa on the other hand. The distinctiveness of the Maghribi regional economies and the intricacy of their role in Western Mediterranean commerce thus recede unduly into the background. Secondly, even as a mere lieu de passage the Maghrib becomes a somewhat schematic doughnut in this rendering. Morocco and Ifriqíya namely hold the limelight, while Tlemcen, in the middle, almost vanishes were it not for mentions of the port of Honein. This is reflected in some of Blanchard’s trail maps, which seem to reduce West-Central Saharan trade dynamics to a see-saw between “Sijilmassa” in the west and Wargla in the east. The result is a great “X” shape whose legs cross at the Tuat both in “old” trail system of 1310-1370 and in the “new” system of 1445-1454.7 Wargla and “Sijilmassa” anchor the northern tips of the “X” throughout, abstracting from the destruction of the walled city of Sijilmassa and from attendant changes in the role of the surrounding oasis of Tafilalt in the 1390s. Trade flows from Honein and Tlemcen are depicted as passing through Fez, or rejoin the Fez branch in the Atlas Mountains and invariably appear to follow the Tafilalt route. The more direct Oued Guir-Oued Saoura trails are not featured. Correspondingly, Catalan, Genoese and Provençal maritime trade is described as emulating in a somewhat mechanistic fashion the arid era rise of the easterly trails leading through the Tuat and other channels to Ifriqíya.8 The middle band represented by the axis Balearics-Honein-Tuat is underplayed, as is the Tlemcenian/Algerian
6
Blanchard, “Egyptian Specie Markets,” 338-43. Blanchard, “Slave Trade,” Maps 1 (“Trans-Saharan Trade, 1310-1370") and 2 (“Trans-Saharan Trade, 1445-1454"). 8 Blanchard, “Egyptian Specie Market,” unpublished draft, at http://www. esh.ed.ac.uk/Courses_IB/Mid_Ages/alexandria.pdf, 10-11. 7
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MARTIN MALCOLM ELBL
coast whose mundane but certainly not unimportant hides, kermes (dyer’s grain), wax or wool, and grain were the money-making staples of Balearic and partly also Valencian light shipping. Very much part of this “middle band” economy, the vibrant Italian/ Majorcan trade in copper and other goods carried through the Tuat to the Western Sudan in the 1390s and early 1400s thus fills a virtual void in Blanchard’s phase of west-east route shift (1375-1435). As early as 1955 Jacques Heers hinted at the relative importance of the Balearic copper trade, suggesting that the sizeable quantities of copper on board the Venetian galleys westbound to Flanders in 1401 were perhaps partly routed to the Maghrib, by way of Majorca. He did not elaborate, however, or show that this metal indeed moved across the desert.9 Since then, the route Venice-Balearic Islands-Maghrib seems to have faded out of sight as a factor in the trans-Saharan trade.10 The works of Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq or Pierre Macaire did not go beyond restating the commonplace, and David Abulafia’s history of the Catalan kingdom of Majorca passed the Balearic copper trade under silence. María Dolores López Pérez’s seminal study of exchanges between the Maghrib and the Crown of Aragon in the fourteenth century, heavily drawing on Majorcan data, ignored copper among Balearic re-exports. Finally, the first Catalan monograph to use the Datini material more extensively, Dolors Pifarré Torres’ analysis of trade between Barcelona and Flanders, briefly alluded to Catalan imports of Flemish copper, but without tracing any Maghrib trade links or touching on the Venetian strand of the copper traffic.11 9 J. Heers, “Il commercio nel Mediterraneo alla fine del sec. XIV e nei primi anni del XV,” Archivio Storico Italiano 113 (2) (1955): 177. 10 The promotional summary for Georges Jehel’s L’Italie et le Maghreb: conflits et échanges du VIIe au XVe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001) (signed Georges Jehel, June 2002, at http://www.clio.fr), further complicated matters by including copper among late medieval Maghribi exports to Italy (“... qui constituent, avec certains minerais comme le cuivre, l’essentiel des exportations du Maghreb vers l’Italie pour approvisionner une production artisanale et industrielle diversifiée en plein essor au XIVe siècle”). The book itself, however, is rather more muted in this matter (Jehel, L’Italie et le Maghreb, 162). 11 Ch.-E. Dufourcq, L'Espagne catalane et le Maghrib aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles. De la bataille de Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) à l'avènement du sultan mérinide Aboul-Hasan (1331) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966); Pierre Macaire, Majorque et le commerce international (1400-1450 environ) (Lille: Atelier de reproductions de thèses (Univ. of Lille III), 1986); David Abulafia, A Mediterranean
COPPER TRADE AND FRANCESCO DATINI
417
The current gap in the literature is not, however, a consequence of scanty data—enough is available to frame at least preliminary answers. It rather reflects a bottleneck in exploiting such massive sources as the Datini archive effectively, in order to find pass-keys unlocking other archival leads and to build up a critical mass of cross-referenced evidence spanning the Western Mediterranean. David Abulafia’s Mediterranena Emporium unintendedly but pertinently exemplified the issue. Having argued that “the Datini evidence, superabundant as it is, cannot be used with confidence to map out Mallorca’s trading links”—a sensible if over-cautious position— Abulafia also suggested that the archive was of limited use for the study of the Maghrib trade. Francesco Datini namely “showed rather little interest in North Africa,” as evidenced by a negligible exchange of letters between “north African localities and Datini agents in the Balearics.” The firm, while expressing “strong interest” in African wares offered in Majorca, supposedly focussed mainly on wax and “to some degree” leather.12 Unfortunately, this amounts to a severe misestimation of the Datini records. From Maghribi wax, wool, and kermes (dyer’s grain)13 to “feather” alum, the West African spice malaguetta, Moroccan gum sandarac, ostrich feathers, and a wide array of Maghribi skins, pelts, rawhide and leather of varying grades and regional provenances, the Datini firm’s Compagnia di Catalogna was in fact extensively involved in Emporium. The Catalan Kingdom of Majorca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); María Dolores López Pérez, La Corona de Aragón y el Magreb en el siglo XIV (1331-1410) (Barcelona: CSIC, Institución Milá y Fontanals, 1995), 570-573; Dolors Pifarré Torres, El comerç internacional de Barcelona i el Mar del Nord (Bruges) a finals del segle XIV (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2002). 12 Abulafia, Mediterranean Emporium, 220-1. 13 One of the substances used to dye fabrics in shades of deep red, purple, or scarlet. See e.g. John H. A. Munro, “The Medieval Scarlet and the Economics of Sartorial Splendour,” in Negley B. Harte and Kenneth G. Ponting, Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe: Essays in Memory of Professor E. M. Carus-Wilson, Pasold Studies in Textile History No. 2 (London: The Pasold Research Fund and Heinemann Educational Books, 1983), 13-70; reprinted in John Munro, Textiles, Towns, and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries, Variorum Collected Studies series CS 442 (Aldershot, Hampshire; and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1994). Also J. H. A. Munro, s.v. “Scarlet,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols., edited by Joseph R. Strayer et al., Vol. 11: Scandinavian Languages to Textiles, Islamic, 36-7 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons/MacMillan, 1982-88 [1988]).
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North African commerce. The same Compagnia supplied Balearic exporters with an array of European goods either retailed in the Maghrib or carried in part across the Sahara, from cloth to petty metalware, eyeglasses, mirrors, beads and paternosters, paper, Eastern spices and lac, chemicals and medicinal substances—and copper. It is true that all the Datini transactions with North Africa were indirect, conducted through Majorcan or Valencian intermediaries. Yet the firm’s lack of direct contact with Maghribi clients, regrettable as it might be for historians, did not reflect faint interest, but the circumstances in which the local branch was set up, and the Balearic merchants’ protectionist tactics. The Datini archive should certainly not be underrated as a resource for the study of North African maritime commerce and, at least obliquely, of discrete Maghribi economic sectors.14 The recent publication (2003) of Giampiero Nigro’s two volumes of Datini and related letters from Majorca may begin to change perceptions in this matter.15 The coverage, however, stops in 1396, the year when the Compagnia di Catalogna finally emerged as a business entity from the awkward formative stage that saw the first implantation of a branch in Majorca. For the bulk of the latter’s most active and profitable years, 1396-1410, and for the intimately related evidence from sister branches in Valencia and Barcelona, it remains necessary to work with the original documents. Moreover, Nigro focussed on the correspondence—quite wisely, from the point of view of timely publication. The bulky unpublished branch ledgers and associated account books, however, are as crucial for interpreting the letters as the latter are for setting the bland transaction records in context. Finally, both strands of the Datini material require careful matching with local sources—Balearic, Valencian or both—to tease out their full significance. In particular, the extent of the Datini firm’s exposure to North African markets can prove difficult
14 Relevant elements can be traced back to the classic works of Federigo Melis, including his fundamental Aspetti della vita economica medievale: studi nell’archivio Datini di Prato (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1962), but new detailed studies (companion pieces to the present paper, based on both correspodence and ledgers) of the Datini wax, kermes, malaguetta, and hide and skin trade through Majorca are only now on the verge of being published. 15 Giampiero Nigro, Mercanti in Maiorca. Il carteggio datiniano dall’isola (13871396), 3 vols. (Florence: Le Monnier, 2003). The third volume containing an interpretive essay and the index was still “in press” as of November 2005.
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to assess without a close knowledge of the Balearic/Valencian merchant scene, especially in the current absence of good indices to the Datini papers. Before discussing the Datini role in the Balearic copper trade and the rather dramatic circumstances of the largest and so ill-starred copper deal orchestrated by the firm’s Majorca branch, a quick sketch of Majorca’s copper market is in order. There is no evidence thus far that the Balearics functioned as a crossroads of Venetian and Flemish supply strands. Virtually all the copper arriving in Majorca in the Datini years was shipped from Venice, frequently with direct involvement by Venetian firms or agents. Copper from the Low Countries did reach the key transshipment nexus in the Maghribi port of Honein, although not through Majorca, but according to contemporary testimony North African buyers distinctly preferred Venetian copper.16 Moreover, as Torres has shown, Tuscan merchants in particular tended to balk at shipping copper from the Low Countries to the Mediterranean because they could not acquire it in Bruges on easy payment terms or through barter for other goods. In the north, copper was all too often cash business. It remains difficult to determine whether the Flemish copper sold in Honein tended to be virgin or part scrap—the firm of Diamante and Altobianco degli Alberti certainly signalled the availability of both at Bruges.17 Venice supplied copper to the Western Mediterranean in three forms: loaf ingots (pani), plates (tavole, tole, lastre di rame), and rods (verghe). The first two predominated in the Majorcan market. Scattered prices for verghe are found in the Datini material but copper was rarely if ever delivered to Majorca in this form even though the Saharan caravans might have preferred rods, as we shall see.18 No 16 ASP, D. (Archivio di Stato di Prato, Archivi di Famiglie e di Persone: Archivio Datini) 998 (number of Datini filza), Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co. (the notation Datini Co. identifies here the so-called lettere di compagnia or “open” letters from one Datini branch to another, as opposed to letters exchanged among individuals within the firm, or strictly private and confidential correspondence; the repetitious full business styles of originating and recipient branches will thus not be given), 23 Jul. 1406, fol. 1v. 17 Torres, Barcelona, 148. Torres mistitled the Diamante and Altobianco degli Alberti partnership in Bruges as “els Diamante”. The correct attribution is evident from the letters to which she refers. 18 ASP, D. 892, Majorca-Barcelona, Datini Co., 31 Jul. 1409, fol. 1v. Further p. 437 below.
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provision seems to have been made for turning plates into rods in Majorca in the Datini years, although in the case of tin Pegolotti clearly stated that in his time (1320-1347) rods for re-export were made from ingots of Cornwall tin both in Majorca and in Venice, with the hallmarked Venetian ones fetching the higher price.19 The documents clearly show that the copper shipped to the Maghrib at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries came largely in plates. The less frequent ingots quoted in Majorca as dell’angnolo (i.e. with the “Lamb” hallmark) occasionally topped the price range. They fell into the category of rame di Papa or the rame della bolla di San Marco di Vinegia (whose general description is found in Pegolotti’s Pratica della Mercatura trade manual). This was refined red copper in breadsized loaves. Somewhat cheaper were the unmarked small loaves of red rame dell’ene.20 Given the colour (molto vermiglio e rosso) and the price, it is likely that both types corresponded at the very least to Rosettenkupfer (using standard German smelting terminology) if not Hammergarkupfer (for the hallmarked ingots). These were the last two steps of copper refining, sometimes conflated in the literature, but in fact distinct. The primary refining of raw copper (Schwarzkupfer) in an open oven (Garherd) to reduce impurities, volatilize arsenic, antimony and zinc, and tie other companion metals in slag, yielded Garkupfer (refined copper) in the form of Rosettenkupfer, but despite its nice red hue the product, while marketable, was still not quite pure and remained poorly malleable. The final Hammergarmachen involved one more smelting with charcoal, and only then were the ingots stamped with a producer’s hallmark. Whether hallmarked (di bolla) or not, the rame in tavole refined and made up into plates in Venice was put on the market in part as malleable Hammergarkupfer. The product was yellowish, verging on brass in colour, although Pegolotti stressed the difference, acknowledged and appreciated by merchants, between this copper and brass properly speaking (“yellow copper”, ottone). The plates were rated good and “sweet” only if they “held up to the hammer” and bent without cracking or breaking. In Pegolotti’s time standard
19 Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, La pratica della mercatura, ed. Allan Evans (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1936), 381-2. 20 Pegolotti, Pratica, 381. For discussion of possible provenance, see pp. 446-7 below.
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Venetian-made plates were sized 1 by 0.5 braccia (0.68 m by 0.34 m).21 The Datini ledgers suggest an average plate weight of c. 12.43 Majorcan pounds or 5.04 kg, and thus a thickness of c. 0.25 cm— if indeed the other two dimensions remained roughly the same since Pegolotti’s time.22 Whether the plates traded through Majorca were mostly “sweet” is not entirely clear from the Datini and Majorcan records. Brittle “sour” plates were undeniably on the market, and Pegolotti had explicitly urged testing batches for “sweetness”. It is tempting to interpret the “sour” plate as copper subjected to imperfect Hammergarmachen or none at all, and mixed in to “pad” bundled lots. The port of Honein, as already implied, was a key entrepôt hub (Alcudia) of the Majorcan/Venetian copper trade, while Ghas. sa . é s. sa . served as a secondary outlet geared towards Moroccan markets, above all Fez. The Datini letters leave no doubt that Honein was at this juncture a prominent head of trail serving the large annual caravans bound for the northern Saharan oases—and from there across the desert (even though the correspondence does not say much regarding the latter). The oasis region of Tuat, repeatedly mentioned in the letters, was a vital staging point south of the Grand Erg Occidental (Great Western Sand Sea) and the Gurara oasis group. It provided a gateway to the so-called Tanezruft route and ultimately to the Niger Bend. Wedged between the Tademaït Plateau and the Tidikelt in the east and the northern outliers of the long dunes of Erg Chech in the west, the Tuat was a major source of food and water at the northern edge of the desolate reg (gravel desert) dominating the Tanezruft Basin. Describing the Tuat in the later fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldún spoke of some 200 qusu . é r (fortified settlements), the most notable among them the bustling caravan station of Tamentit (Tamantít). Besides Tamentit, Ibn Khaldún highlighted the micro-regions of Buda (in the north) and Reg-
21
Pegolotti, Pratica, 381. ASP, D. 1016, Libro grande bianco segn. C (Majorca), fol. 115r (27,968.5 Majorcan pounds = 2,251 copper plates). The probable thickness has been calculated using the specific weight of 8.6 kg/dm3 as a reasonable compromise in lieu of the unknown specific weight of the medieval copper sold in Majorca. The specific weight of pure modern copper is 8.93 kg/dm3 at 15 C, falling to 8.9 and 8.8 for laminated and cast copper respectively. Casting brass and rolled and drawn brass vary between 8.4 and 8.73 kg/dm3 and the specific weight of beryllium copper can be as low as 8.1 kg/dm3. 22
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gane (the southern outpost where the Oued Messaoud (Ghir-Saoura) “vanished among the sands”).23 Buda, the former head of trail for caravans travelling to Mauritania’s Walaéta, had reputedly yielded its rank to Tamentit by Ibn Khalduén’s time. Confusingly enough, Ibn Khalduén also referred to Buda as the “westernmost” of Tuat’s micro-regions and to Tamentit as the “easternmost” one, but this is true only in a rather tenuous sense— the Tuat in fact stretches along a steep NNW to SSE line (Maps 1 and 2). The region is a string of discrete oasis nodes straddling the Greenwich meridian (0 longitude) down the east side of the Oued Messaoud (Oued Tuat) valley, an extension of the Oued Saoura.24 The qusu . é r of the larger Tuat were clustered in micro-regional groups structuring the oasis region geographically and politically from north to south, not east to west: Buda, Timmi/Adrar, and then Tuat as such (Fenughil [Fenourhil], Tamest, Zaglou (Tuat al-henna), Inzegmir, and Reggane). There was not much real difference between a caravan station at Buda (north-west of mod. Adrar) and at Tamentit (south of Timmi, north of Fenughil), some 50 km or a long day’s march away.25 Buda was simply the first cross-roads of trails from the Dar’a and the Tafilalt in the north-west (through the Kahal de
Walíé al-Díén ‘Abd al-Rahma é n Abué Zayd ibn Khalduén, Kitaéb ta’ríékh al-duwal . al-islaémíéya bi-’l-Maghrib min Kitaéb al-’ibar. Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l'Afrique septentrionale, trans. MacGuckin De Slane, new ed. P. Casanova (Paris: Geuthner, 1925-1956) 1: 191, 196; 3: 298. The standard coordinates for Tamentit (often not shown on general maps), are lat. 27.75 N, lon. 0.28 W. For recent studies see Y. Guillermou, “Survie et ordre social au Sahara. Les oasis du Touat-Gourara-Tidikelt en Algérie,” Cahiers de l’ORSTOM, Série Sciences Humaines 29 (1) (1993): 121-38. Despite its title, B. Gabriel’s “Zur vorzeitlichen Besiedlung Südalgeriens (Tanesrouft, Tidekelt, Touat, Gourara),” Erde 115 (1-2) (1984): 93-109 surveys some of the local medieval structures, as does J.-C. Échallier, Villages désertés et structures agraires anciennes du Touat-Gourara (Sahara algérien) (Paris: A.M.G., 1972). Note that the Oued Messaoud “vanished” in roughly the same place still in the nineteenth century (the dunes cut across it just south of Timadanine and Taourirt, the southernmost qusu . é r of Reggane. See e.g. Camille Sabatier, Touat, Sahara et Soudan. Etude géographique, politique, économique et militaire (Paris: Société d’éditions scientifiques, 1891), 261). 24 The standard definition of the Tuat refers to the stretch from Adrar and Reggane, or, according to a broader topographic schema, from latitude 26 5' N to latitude 27 5' N. 25 The “long day” is based on nineteenth-century estimates of the speed of a merchant caravan comprising only riders (c. 38-40 km/day). A caravan partially on foot would see this fall to some 32 km. Sabatier, Touat, 234-5. 23
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Tabelbala), and from Figuig in the north. Most routes from the east, north, and west intersected, however, at Timmi and Tamentit. The latter was a little more defensible, but in no way precluded striking out along south-westerly trails. Only upon reaching Reggane, another 100 km to the south, would a caravan essentially have to commit to the Tanezruft route.26 The Tuat was by no means unknown to fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Italians and Catalans. Buda and a castrum de Tagenduhet (possibly Tamentit) appear in the Majorcan portolan of Angelino Dulcert27 (1339), Buda in the Catalan Atlas of 1375 and in the “Catalan Planisphere” of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples (fifteenth century), and both Tamentit and Buda (ciutat de Buda) in the planisphere of Mecià de Villadestes (c. 1413), in the “Catalan Planisphere” of Modena’s Biblioteca Estense (fifteenth century), and in the atlas chart of the Genoese Battista Beccario (1426). Tuat and Buda grande figure in a fifteenth-century Italian planisphere from the Vatican Galleries.28 The importance of the oasis region appears to have been fairly well understood by those working for the Datini firm: from the very first mention in the Datini letters the tone is matter-of-fact, without any hint of need for explanation. One can thus only assume that Tuat was equally familiar to Venetians involved more often and more routinely in the copper traffic. Venetians resident in the Balearics (e.g. Bernardo Bon) or leading copper suppliers such as the Contarini may have known at least as much as the Datini men. Jewish merchants—Majorcan as well as Maghribi—played a significant role in the copper trade linking the Balearics, Honein, and Tuat. By 1394, Majorcan Jews and post-1391 conversos were forcefully
26 Buda was exposed to nomad raids from the north-west in the sense of being located at the vulnerable northern tip of the Tuat. Tamentit enjoyed at least a notional “defense in depth” advantage. None the less, given that a raiding party mounted on mehari camels could cover up to 100 km/day when pushing the mounts, Tamentit’s greater “safety” from Dar’a or Sus raiders was dubious. 27 Also known as Dulcet (Eduard Pérez i Pons, Fonts per a l’estudi de la comunitat jueva de Mallorca, Catalonia Hebraica VI (Barcelona: PPU, 2005), 124 (doc. 495, Mar. 1330)). 28 Ch. de la Roncière, La découverte de l'Afrique au moyen âge: cartographes et explorateurs, 2 vols. (Cairo: La Société Royale de Géographie d’Égypte, 19251925), 1: Frontispice, Plates VIII, X, XI, XIII, XV. In the “Catalan Planisphere” of the Estense, Buda is considerably displaced, as compared to the almost correct position in Dulcert and a fair approximation in Villadestes.
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reasserting themselves in the Maghrib trade, despite the hardship and disruption inflicted on the Majorcan Jewish community by the violent socio-political crisis of 1391 and the attendant assault on the aljama in Ciutat de Mallorca (mod. Palma). Honein Jews, some of them from Majorcan lineages or from families with close ties to Majorca before 1391, were instrumental in warehousing the metal and arranging its transport to Tuat, even though they do not seem to have always travelled south with the caravans. The exact division of labour between Honein and Tuat Jews remains nonetheless unclear. Tamentit has long been associated in both oral tradition and in historiography with a vibrant Jewish presence, particularly between 1300 and 1492. The isolated fourteenth-century tombstones with Hebrew inscriptions found at Buda (in Ghormali) and at Tamentit between 1903 and the 1950s moreover suggest a certain opulence, as well as the presence of reputable rabbis and halakha commentators. The structures of the trade on which this prosperity rested are poorly known, however, and the Datini material adds only tantalizing glimpses.29 Jewish and converso participation in the copper trade should by no means obscure, however, the substantial and aggressive involvement by Majorca’s “old Christian” merchants of diverse financial stature, from Bernat Tudela and Joan Toreyó to the notary and Maghrib trader Julià Fontcuberta and powerful players such the Pachs brothers and Antoni Quint. It is true that they focussed largely on one segment of the metal traffic—within the triangle Majorcathey deemed they could control at least Honein-Ghas. sa . ã s. sa—which . in part. Yet this was by no means exceptional. The Datini firm, to 29 The responsa (takkanot) of Issac b. Sheshet concerning Tuati affairs (incidentally confirming the importance of the Honein-Tuat link) are far too sketchy, as are those of R. Solomon b. Semah Duran (for instance concerning copper transported from Oran to the Tuat), conveniently referenced in H. Z. (J. W.) Hirschberg, “The Problem of the Judaized Berbers,” Journal of African History 4 (3) (1963): 323-4 (note, however, that the article contains errors and should be used with caution). Malfante reported that in 1447 Tuat trade was in the hands of local Jews, but that does not say much about the situation around 1400. Subsequently, the Jewish community of Tamentit was decimated (probably in 1492, and again in 1503), during episodes of repression fomenb. ‘Abd al-Karíém b. Muhammad al-Maghíélíé, ted by the scholar Muhammad . . who had first settled in the Tuat in 1477-1478 (see ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ‘Abd-Allah Batran, “A Contribution to the Biography of Shaikh Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd alKarim Ibn Muhammad (‘Umar) al-Maghili al-Tilimsani,” Journal of African History 14 (3) (1973): 381-94).
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some extent on sufferance from the Majorcans, was doing the same, and in so far as it functioned as a supplier of copper it relied in turn on Venetian contacts and most often on Venetian ships. The Balearic and Maghribi Jews who competed in the maritime triangle with the Majorcan “old Christians” and Italians projected their influence further south, to the Maghribi-northern Saharan segment— but once again within limits. The Datini letters and other sources suggest that prominent operators such as Ayon Susen rarely if at all travelled south of Honein, gladly leaving the next stage to better informed and more entrenched locals, Muslims and Jews, and ultimately to the Tuatis. The first coherent glimpse of the Majorcan turn-of-the-century copper trade dates to 1390, while the economically depressed 1380s represent a void, for now. In 1390, deliveries of copper to Majorca were chanelled mainly through the Venetian merchants Bernardo Bon and Polo di Giovanni, with the most important shipment reaching the Balearics on board the cog of Giaconello de’ Falchi.30 Information for 1391-1393 is meagre, owing to the paucity of Balearic trade records and to lack of research on Majorcan notarial registers predating the well-known fifteenth-century records of the notary Antoni Contestí. The Datini letters—those received from business contacts and arms-length agents prior to the arrival of Datini staff in the Balearics—fail to fill the gap. The reason is threefold. Firstly, it is quite clear that outsiders had a certain mental image of the Datini firm’s “profile” and typical requirements and adjusted their reporting accordingly. Secondly, the letters amply show that even the best contacts were politely coy about “trade secrets” in terms of specific local knowledge. Finally, the flow of information was shaped by the contacts’ own business operations. The Datini firm was simply perceived as not being very much into raw metals, correspondents such as Nofri di Bonaccorso or Antonio di Filippo Lorini and Co. were not prone to dabble in copper, and Nofri was overtly paranoid about his fragile position of intermediary and local expert.
30
ARM (Arxiu del Regne de Mallorca), RP (Patrimoni Reial/Real Patrimonio) 1998, fols. 2v-3r, 6v-7r (the identification of the Majorcan registers’ “Polo de Venecia” with Polo di Giovanni remains tentative). The customs register in question carries a misleading attribution to 1386-1390; the contents cover in fact the year 1390, while a detached folded sheet inserted at the back provides a summary financial statement by the clavari for the year 1387.
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The year 1394 saw the island market resupplied in copper for the most part by the outbound galleys of the regular Venetian Flanders line, which docked at Ciutat de Mallorca on Good Friday (17 April) and unloaded virtually nothing but a large quantity of copper, as reported by Antonio Lorini.31 An identical schedule was followed in 1395, when copper and brass shipped from Venice partly on behalf of Alvise Contarini and partly consigned to the Majorcan Bernat Tudela and the Venetian Benedetto di Michele was delivered by the Flanders galleys Capitana, Lombarda, Moceniga and Giustiniana on 16 April.32 The Datini firm began to pay moderate attention to the transit of copper through the islands in 1394, following its first awkward attempt to find a foothold in Majorca. Ambrogio Lorenzi de’ Rocchi, the young Datini factor who arrived in the Balearics from Valencia on 16 March 1394, was routinely quoting local copper prices in his business corespondence within the next half-year.33 It was not until two years after the Datini Compagnia di Catalogna branch structure had finally been set up in 1396, however, that the firm developed a sustained and growing interest in the MajorcanMaghribi copper traffic. Cristofano di Bartolo Carocci, who had assumed management of the Majorca branch in March 1396, at first handled brass and copper only on behalf of others, such as Alberto degli Alberti of Bruges, and the Venetians Messer Antonio Contarini and Paoluccio di Maestro Paolo. In January 1399, however, he strongly urged the mother company to order from Venice, through Zanobi di Tadeo Gaddi, up to 15 or 20 migliai grossi of copper plate (7.1 to 9.5 metric tons) for resale to Majorcan Maghrib traders (“per la
31 Nigro, Mercanti, 2: 994 (doc. 439, 25-28 April 1304, Majorca-Valencia, Antonio di Flippo Lorini Co. To Datini Co.). 32 ARM, RP 2002, fols. 6r-6v (the folio numbers for this register are the original manuscript numbers, not the subsequently stamped archival page numbers). The 31 bales of copper (aram) sheet on the Capitana, for which duty was paid by Messer Giacomino Arnuzzi were consigned by the Contarini merchant house and declared to be worth 440 l.M. (Majorcan pounds of account); the 52 bales on the Lombarda were worth 840 l.M.; the 20 costals on the Moceniga were worth 100 l.M. The Tudela/Michele shipment on the latter galley amounted to 17 costals worth 115 l.M. The Giustiniana carried 8 costals of copper (coure) worth 115 l.M. 33 E.g. Nigro, Mercanti, 930 (doc. 406, Ambrogio Lorenzi to Datini Co., 7 (12) Oct. 1394), 607 (doc. 255, Ambrogio Lorenzi to Datini Co., 30 Oct. 1394), 642 (doc. 265, Ambrogio Lorenzi to Datini Co., 22 (29) Dec. 1395).
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Barberia”).34 His insistence on delivery by the first available ship or failing that by the Flanders galleys (obviously those of the spring muda) fell, however, on deaf ears. Bernardo Bon and the Contarini had saturated the Majorcan market with loaf ingot copper by May, and were trying to move much of it out to Valencia, speculating on a rise in prices in case of war between Portugal and Castile rather than on sustained sales in the Maghrib. Plate copper, more suited for the latter market, was nonetheless in short supply and deliveries from Venice, delayed by a quarrel between Venice and the Crown of Aragon over navigation laws, were not expected until later in September. In October 1399 Cristofano still vainly advocated that the firm invest in some 200 to 300 centinai grossi of copper plate (9.5 to 14.3 metric tons).35 Stoldo di Lorenzo and Francesco Datini (the principals of the mother company in Prato/Florence) stubbornly held off into the spring of 1400. In the meantime, the renewed outbreak of the Portuguese-Castilian conflict was imminently expected to raise the price of loaf ingot copper, preferred in the Iberian Peninsula. Copper plate for the Maghrib was also in strong demand, however, and the 16 bales unloaded in May from the Verzona were snapped up at above market price. The trading season’s main profits went to Datini competitors, particularly Bastiano di Bartolo. It was not until the following year (1401) that Cristofano finally managed to have 20 bales of plate shipped out to Majorca. He waited anxiously for the galleys, but did not receive his copper until much later, in mid-June. He thus partly missed a window of opportunity for getting cargo on board the ship scheduled to connect with the caravans in Honein, and nearly half the batch consequently remained in his
34 ASP, D. 667, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co., 27 Jan. 1399, fol. 1v. The recommendation, ultimately intended for the firm’s main contact in Venice, was framed in Venetian units of measure and the corresponding conversion is used here (1 migliaio grosso = 477 kg). The same applies to the centinai grossi mentioned next (1 centinaio grosso = 47.7 kg). See Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, Vol. 1, Coins and Moneys of Account (Baltimore, 1985), 360 and Ronald Edward Zupko, Italian Weights and Measures from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1981), 134 (for the underlying Venetian pound). 35 ASP, D. 996, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 24 May 1399, fols. 1r, 2r; ASP, D. 996, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 5 Jun. 1399, fol. 1r; ASP, D. 667, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co., 4 Sep. 1399, fol. 3r; ASP, D. 667, MajorcaFlorence, Datini Co., 22 Oct. 1399, fol. 2r.
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stockroom. September brought further complications both for him and for competitors. The Jewish traders who had initially been willing to buy up all that was left, plate and loaf ingots as well, had been advised from Honein to hold off. Ultimately the Balearic market went into hibernation until next March, and the Valencia branch was only partially successful in finding takers for copper as late as October.36 The advancing autumn spawned its usual share of pipe dreams, and Cristofano suggested an over-ambitious scheme for shipping cloth, copper, and other merchandise to the Maghrib with the help of the Valencian Muslim merchant Jucef Xipio. The pressure to come up with some strategy increased when, in the middle of the slack season, Tuccio di Gennaio consigned with Cristofano another 30 quintals of copper re-routed from Valencia and brought in by way of Ibiza. Unfortunately, the expected departure of the nave of in January 1402 brought Cristofano no Jaume Tudela for Ghas. sa . ã s. sa . comfort, for to his suprised irritation he found himself locked out through tacit collusion among Majorcan merchants. To dispose of his remaining 36 bales of metal he then put his hopes in the Jewish merchants trading to Honein, and geared up for the next trading bout only in July, almost too late. By then copper plate for the caravans was a hot item, demand in Honein was stronger than ever before, and the Saharan trade buying pressure had spilled over even to such items as glass prayer beads, “blue and large as a middling nut, such as are customarily brought by the Venetian galleys.”37
36 ASP, D. 996, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 31 Jan. 1400, fol. 1v; ASP, D. 667, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co., 6 Apr. 1400, fol. 1r; ASP, D. 667, MajorcaFlorence, Datini Co., 26 May 1400, fol. 1v (recommending a shipment of 20,000 pounds of copper plate); ASP, D. 996, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 28 Aug. 1400, fol. 2r; ASP, D. 997, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 13 Jun. 1401, fol. 1v; ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co., 16 Jun. 1401, fols. 1r-1v; ASP, D. 997, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 12 Sep. 1401, fol. 1v; ASP, D. 997, Majorca-Valencia, Cristofano di Bartolo to Luca del Sera, 6 Oct. 1401, fol. 1r. 37 ASP, D. 997, Majorca-Valencia, Cristofano di Bartolo to Luca del Sera, 28 Oct. 1401, fols. 1r-2v (fol. 2v contains the lengthy outline of the Jucef Xipio project, and a digression on how to save on customs by shipping goods to the Maghrib in Xipio’s name and to Majorca under the Datini merchant mark); ASP, D. 997, Majorca-Valencia, Cristofano di Bartolo to Luca del Sera, 15 Nov. 1401, fol. 1v; ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co., 12 Jan. 1402, fol. 1r; ASP, D. 997, Majorca-Valencia, Cristofano di Bartolo to Luca del Sera, 11 Feb. 1402, fol. 1r; ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co., 17 Apr. 1402, fols. 1r1v; ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co., 17 Apr. 1402, fol. 2v (“.... i
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Cristofano now dared to think bigger, in the range of 500 quintals (20.3 metric tons) of copper at one go.38 In the summer of 1403 Cristofano was hard at work negotiating the potential sale of a sizeable shipment of copper sent out by the Contarini on board the Chopa. The talks were not going quite well, given that his usual Jewish contacts (“gli amici”), Haim Susen and Balaix Feraig, besides being short of cash, were already overcommitted on account of taking off his hands metal belonging to the Dandolo firm of Venice. Haim and Balaix held off even after having been rescued by an inflow of gold coin from the Maghrib, and drove a hard bargain when they finally agreed to buy 120 quintals. Cristofano was desperately trying to get Aion Haim and others interested.39 That autumn’s bright point, as he stressed, was the fact at least the leftovers of Contarini copper and the Dandolo tin remained unscathed and were successfully excavated from the ruins of the Datini house in Majorca, which collapsed in mid-October 1403. A massive flash flood of the Riera stream that wound down the centre of the late medieval Ciutat de Mallorca devastated the downtown business district, and the stacked metal ingots were one of the few things not carried away or destroyed by the muddy waters.40 By December the market remained soft and then virtually collapsed, making Cristofano rue having received another 16 quintals of Contarini metal through Piero Mattei in Ibiza. His expectations that it would take a year to see an improvement turned out, however, to be unjustified. Between January and August 1404 he and paternostri di vetro azurini, grossi chome una nuciola mezana, chome solglono portare le ghalee de’ Viniziani ...”). 38 ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co., 23 Jul. 1402, fol. 1r. Given the reference frame of the Datini letters and ledgers, the quintal is here reckoned as 100 Majorcan pounds of 0.406 kg. Pegolotti does set the size of the Majorcan quintal (cantaro dells terra) at 104 Majorcan pounds, and specifies that copper is sold by the “Barbary quintal” (cantaro barberesco) of 121 Majorcan pounds. The Datini ledgers, however, systematically reckon copper by a quintal of 100 pounds (see e.g. ASP, D. 1015, Libro grande bianco segn. B (Majorca), fol. 71r), and the firm’s internal usage is obviously the one to follow when converting relevant figures. 39 ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co., 7 Jul. 1403, fol. 2r; ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co., 12 Jul. 1403, fol. 1v; ASP, D. 668, MajorcaFlorence, Datini Co., 23 Jul. 1403, fol. 1r. 40 ASP, D. 997, Majorca-Valencia, Cristofano di Bartolo to Luca del Sera, 6 Nov. 1403, fol. 1r.
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his chief factor Niccolò di Giovanni Mazzuoli successfully sold over 6,000 pounds of copper plate (2.44 metric tons) on behalf of Messer Antonio Contarini to a select group of dealers comprising Haim Susen, Solomon Sorell, and Samuel (probably Samuel Fazuati) on the Jewish side, and Joan Toreyó and the money-changer Pere Barrera among the Christians.41 The volatile nature of the copper trade nonetheless re-asserted itself by April 1405, six months after Niccolò replaced Cristofano as manager. Although there was no copper to be had in Majorca, the island’s Maghrib traders remained cautious, willing to buy only on merchant credit with payment due only after return from Honein. Even such mavericks as Ayon Susen were short of cash, and there was little sign of the boom about to start during the winter of 1405-1406.42 The subsequent magic-wand change, however, had Niccolò soon in a panic. He had sold third-party copper forward and by March 1406 penalties for non-delivery threatened. Branch letters to Barcelona, Valencia, and Florence were peppered with reminders, accompanied by exclamations of pious hope that the metal would arrive with the Flanders-bound galleys. Measures were also taken to secure offshore lighters for unloading in case the galleys failed to tie up at the main quay because of current tensions over potential new duties. Finally, June 1406 found Niccolò busy weighing copper with his large balance (romana) for his Jewish customers and for Joan Toreyó. Over 22,000 pounds of copper plate (8.93 metric tons) belonging to the Florentine firm of Bernabò degli Agli went to Abraham Arquet, Magalluf ben Allon, and Ayon Susen, as well as to Joan Toreyó. Ayon took another 1,414 pounds belonging to Francesco Datini and 227 pounds were consigned to Jaume Bonet in Valencia, through Pere Bassa. The nave of Rafael Ferrer brought more plate and loaf ingots from Venice, and the Valencia branch staked an interest in part of the shipment even though Niccolò favoured selling it in Majorca if the metal was weighed, packed, and ready to go before the expected departure of the last ship to Honein, set at around 29 July. Ultimately, 780 pounds of Bernabò 41 ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, 9 Jan. 1403, fol. 2v; ASP, D. 1014, Libro grande bianco segn. A (Majorca), fols. 154v-155r. 42 ASP, D. 997, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 9 Apr. 1405, fol. 3r; ASP, D. 997, Majorca-Valencia, Cristofano di Bartolo to Luca del Sera, 14 Jun. 1405. Ayon Susen was a relative of Haim Susen, living on and off in Tenes (Algeria), Majorca, and then Honein.
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degli Agli’s loaf ingots from the Ferrer shipment were sold to Abraham Arquet and to the converso Maghrib traders Pere Pardo and Francesc Bellviure.43 By the end of August, however, Niccolò began to feel uneasy. Joan Toreyó, Abraham Arquet, Magaluff ben Allon and Ayon Susen had virtually cornered the copper trade to Honein and the Datini firm, as well as Bastiano di Bartolo, had several thousand florins at stake with them. Pere Bassa, who was attempting to carve out his own privileged niche, moreover pressed the Majorcan branch for a binding arrangement to deliver copper on demand, any time, and drove a hard bargain. His terms were for retied bundles, wrapped in fresh canvas, and delivered FOB to the hold of the outbound vessel. The bustle died down by mid-September and payments were now beginning to flow back from the Maghrib, but not necessarily in cash—one of the return commodities tended to be the scarlet dyestuff kermes. Selling the kermes, however, required time and put the onus on the payee, not the debtor. This created a timing problem for Niccolò—the Datini firm was once again in the throes of serious reorganization and it appeared, until the spring of 1407, that the Majorca branch would after all be liquidated and Niccolò transferred to Valencia.44 Regardless of diverse economic troubles, however, including weak demand for cloth in the Maghrib, the copper market stubbornly picked up once again. The Majorca branch having been granted a “stay of execution” by the mother company, Niccolò tried to make up for profits lost during the months of uncertainty and betted heavily on copper, with Francesco Datini’s blessing. By mid-June he reported having disposed of around 500 quintals belonging to Francesco and to Ser Antonio di Lapaccio, while another 200 quintals were earmarked for loading on board a galley armed by the prominent Majorcan merchant Nicholau de Pachs. Some 150 43
ASP, D. 891, Majorca-Barcelona, Datini Co., 23 Mar. 1406, fol. 1r; ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 26 Mar. 1406, fol. 1r; ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 4 May 1406, fol. 1r; ASP, D. 998, MajorcaValencia, Datini Co., 21 Jun. 1406, fols. 1r-1v; ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 10 Jul. 1406; ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 19 Jul. 1406, fol. 1v; ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 23 Jul. 1406, fol. 1r; ASP, D. 1015, Libro grande bianco segn. B (Majorca), fols. 70v-71r, 78v-79r. 44 ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 31 Aug. 1406, fols. 2v, 3v; ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., fol. 1v; ASP, D. 981, MajorcaBarcelona, Datini Co., 27 Oct. 1406, fol. 1r.
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quintals were expected to sell shortly, before the scheduled departure of the Pachs galley for Honein (toward the end of June). The 200 quintals set aside were part of an untypical interlocking set of common ventures between Italian merchants and Majorca’s “old Christians” headed by the Pachs and by Antoni de Quint, aimed at unseating Jews and conversos from their current position of leadership in the copper trade.45 To hedge bets, however, 279 quintals belonging mostly to Francesco Datini, with Antonio di Lapaccio contributing a minor share, were also spread among various Jewish, converso, and other traders, on credit terms stretching into December.46 On behalf of another countryman, Giovanni Tosinghi, Niccolò sold just over 213 quintals of the 550 that Tosinghi had consigned with the branch on commission.47 The metal ultimately put up by various participants, including 500 quintals ventured by Nicholau de Pachs, amounted to roughly 200,000 Majorcan pounds or 82 metric tons of copper, not counting copper traded outside of the Datini circle and thus much more poorly documented. By the end of September, the Venetian nave of Ser Marco de’ Benedetti had unloaded another 141 bales of copper plate and the local market showed signs of glut. Niccolò begged the Valencia branch to explore all possibilities of selling copper there, on condition of making buyers agree not to resell in Majorca, for that would further spoil the already saturated market.48
45 Tosinghi and Antoni de Quint were also shipping out between them another R 2,000 worth of copper, 2/7 of which represented Tosinghi’s investment and the rest that of de Quint. This is reported in letters outlining subsequent developments: ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 29 Sep. 1407, fol. 1r; ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co., 25 Mar. 1408, fol. 1r. For allusions to the other issues, see e.g. ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Niccolò di Giovanni Mazzuoli to Francesco Datini, 15 Nov. 1406, fol. 1v. 46 The whole Datini/Lapaccio batch weighing 27,968 1/2 lb was posted as sold for 2,622 l.M. 1s. 2d., or 2,471 l. 10s. 2d. net of expenses (ASP, D. 1016, Libro grande bianco segn. C (Majorca), fols. 114v-115r. Further see ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 16 Jun. 1407, fol. 1r. The related losses are discussed for instance in ASP, D. 892, Majorca-Barcelona, Datini Co., 16 (18) Dec. 1408, fol. 1v; ASP, D. 892, Majorca-Barcelona, Datini Co., 31 Jul. 1409. 47 ASP, D. 1016, Libro grande bianco segn. C (Majorca), fol. 38v. Tosinghi’s copper was worth 2,006 l.M. 16s. 1d., or 1,794 l.M. 15s. 9d. net of expenses (ASP, D. 1016, Libro grande bianco segn. C (Majorca) fols. 116v-117r). 48 ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 29 Sep. 1407, fol. 1r; ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co., 25 Mar. 1408, fol. 1r; ASP, D. 998, Majorca-
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Then, in January and February 1408, alarming news reached the Balearics that a raiding party had attacked and robbed the Tuat caravan. Initial estimates of potential loss tallied up to 2,622 l.M. for Francesco Datini and Antonio di Lapaccio, and some 600 R. (reials) for Giovanni Tosinghi, with the posibility that Tosinghi’s joint loss with Antoni de Quint might run as high as 2,000 R.49 Subsequent revised assessments dating to December 1408 showed that about half the copper was irretrievably lost. The full extent of the disaster is impossible to specify—Niccolò’s comments indeed suggest that the caravan also carried, for instance, copper and other goods sent from Valencia, and at least one Genoese merchant active in Majorca, Battista Campanaro, may have supplied more metal to the affected Jewish and converso dealers.50 Various merchants from Tlemcen, Fez, and other trade centers surely suffered losses as well, given that an annual caravan to the Western Sudan could easily marshal 8,000 to 12,000 camels and represented the confluence of diverse strands of commerce. What was the robbery’s Maghribi context? Firstly, the considerable delay with which the news broke and the lack of available detail leave some doubt about the location: either somewhere between Honein and Tuat, or in the vicinity of the oasis region. Secondly, in saying that culprits were “una chonpagnia d’Arabi” Niccolò might have been unable to appreciate the difference between “Arab” and Tuareg.51 If, however, “Arabs” were indeed involved, then two alternatives are perhaps worth considering. On the one hand, the attackers may have been either traditional rivals of the dominant Ma‘qil nomad group that benefited from the passage of the caravans by virtue of controlling the space between Honein, the lower Moulouya River, and Tuat, or a disaffected splinter of the dominant group. On the other hand, the fact that reports of subsequent negoValencia, Datini Co., 29 Sep. 1407. 49 ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co. to Francesco Datini, 25 Mar. 1408, fol. 1r. The Majorcan reial (reale in the Datini ledgers) was worth on average 15 s. Barcelonese, and thus equivalent to the Florentine florin. See Melis, Aspetti, 249 and Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London: Royal Historical Society, 1986), 141. 50 ASP, D. 892, Majorca-Barcelona, Datini Co., 10 Apr 1408; ASP, D. 892, Majorca-Barcelona, Datini Co., 16 (18) Dec. 1408, fol. 1v. 51 ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co. to Francesco Datini, 25 Mar. 1408 (“... lo mandavano [the copper] a Tuet, e una chonpagnia d’Ar(a)bi l’àno tutto rubato ...”).
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tiations for return of the cargo trickled in from varied points, as far east as Collo and Annaba, raises the possibility that the caravan was held to ransom by Arab partisans of the force sent from Morocco by the Marínid sultan Abú Sa‘íd ’Uthmán III to support the emir b. Abí Yahyá in his attempt to seize Abú ‘Abd Alláh Muhammad . . power in Ifriqíya in 1407-1408.52 As for the first alternative, it is well known that Gurara and the Tuat formed part of the winter nomadization grounds of the Ma‘qil Arabs of the Dhué ’Ubayd Allaéh group. The ’Ubayd Allaéh controlled by the later fourteenth century northern (summer) grounds reaching from the region of Tlemcen to Taurirt, to Oujda and the estuary of the Moulouya, and from there southward to sources of the Za. While in their summer encampments in the tell, they collected tolls from traffic, for instance, between Honein and Tlemcen. The eastern segment of the ’Ubayd Allaéh, the Kharaéj, tended to recognize in the later fourteenth century the authority of Tlemcen, whereas the western Haddaéj gravitated under Maríénid influence. Their neighbours and standing rivals were the Banué ’Amr b. Zoghba, who claimed as summer grounds the approaches to Oran, the Tessala, and the areas south of Tlemcen.53 The Honein-Tuat caravan may well have fallen victim to a breakdown of peace at the intersection of the cross-cutting allegiances and closely adjacent nomadization corridors, none too stable during the fulsomely praised but conspiI, sultan of cuously fragile reign of Abué ‘Abd Allaéh Muhammad . Tlemcen. It is however equally plausible, and perhaps more so, given the specific timing, that the culprit was indeed the eastbound expedition b. Abíé Yahya of Abué ‘Abd Allaéh Muhammad . . é . A former governor of sid Annaba and a rebel cousin of ‘Abd al-‘Azíéz Abué Faéris the Haf . . sultan of Tunis, Abué ‘Abd Allaéh had taken refuge at the court of ém were the Arab Fez. It is a moot point whether or not the Hakí . fraction who reportedly came to request Marínid help and who brought the emir back east with them, together with his Maríénid b. Abíé Sanuéna support force. Certainly they and their shaykh Ahmad . were in the forefront of the rebellion against Abué Faéris and were 52 R. Brunschvig, La Berbérie orientale sous les Haf sides. Des origines à la fin . . du XVe siècle (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1940), 214-5; E. Fagnan, trans., Chronique des Almohades et des Hafsides attribuée à Zerkechi (Constantine: Adolphe Braham, 1895), 200-201. 53 Ibn Khalduén, Berbères, 1: 101, 103-4, 120-2.
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responsible for his initial defeat in late summer to early fall 1407 between al-Hamma and Nefzaoua.54 The Honein caravan may have in fact delayed its departure in a bid to avoid the Abué ‘Abd Allaéh’s eastbound forces, only to run into them all the same, or into their flanking Arab outriders. It would have been quite natural for part of the captured copper to be then carried east, with the advancing army, while negotiators sought a ransom that would have nicely rounded out Abué ‘Abd Allaéh’s war chest. This would acount rather tidily for news of the robbery spreading as late as January 1408, as well as for the fact that word of the stiff ransom of 10 double dinars a camel load arrived by way of Collo and Annaba around mid-May 1408.55 By 15 June 1408, as the rebellion was collapsing under Abué Faéris’ counterattack, there was still hope that the metal would be ransomed by Jewish negotiators. The Majorcan copper market had nonetheless stalled, and the Datini branch feared that its Valencian counterpart would find itself in the same position, given that “all of it [the copper] goes by the same route” (i.e. through Honein).56 Abraham Arquet had lost all the copper purchased from the Datini firm and was temporarily penniless, and Niccolò begged the Florence mother company to arrange the sale of a batch of Arquet’s kermes in lieu of cash payment. Magaluff ben Allon anxiously waited for a ship to return from Oran, Honein and Mostaganem so that he could pay the Datini firm for the copper that originally formed part of the batch put up for sale on Francesco Datini’s own account. Niccolò’s pocket, incidentally, was just as empty and he proposed to draw bills of exchange on Barcelona to raise much needed cash.57 Finally, in December the worst possible news arrived from the Maghrib— although some of the metal had indeed been recovered, over a half was lost for good. Some 315 quintals (12.8 metric tons) of the Datini/Lapaccio copper had fortunately remained in Honein under the safeguard 54
The exact dating of the rebellion’s last stages remain uncertain (14071409). Brunschvig, Berbérie, 214-5; Fagnan, Hafsides, 200-1; E. Fagnan, trans., Extraits inédits relatifs au Maghreb (Algiers, 1924), 297. 55 ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 13 May 1408, fol. 1r. 56 ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 15 Jun. 1408, fol. 1r; ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 4 Sep. 1408, fol. 1r. 57 ASP, D. 892, Majorca-Barcelona, Datini Co., 20 Jun. 1408, fol. 1v; ASP, D. 892, Majorca-Barcelona, Datini Co., 12 Sep. 1408, fol. 1r.
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of Ayon Susen. So did some of Giovanni Tosinghi’s lot (whether also stored with Susen or not remains unclear). Another 60 quintals were rescued, but the ransom was more “than it was worth,” as Niccolò put it. The Jewish merchant who made the arrangements took the copper to the Tuat in person, but was not expected to do better than break even. The Majorca branch was moreover billed 78 R. for its share of customs and expenses. Another 1,256 doblas’ worth of copper was entrusted to a Honein Jew who forwarded the entire lot to the Tuat together with other remnants of merchandise, but this cargo was in its turn stolen, probably in November 1408. The unfortunate merchant was finally allowed to discount the lost shipment at 700 doblas (as opposed to over 1,300 original worth), pawning a house in Honein to raise 400 doblas and promising to pay the remaining 300 in nine months’ time.58 In Majorca the Jewish copper dealers closed ranks and made themselves inconspicuous, sold only for cash, and insisted on generous merchant credit when buying.59 In April-May 1409 caravan suppliers began to make deals again, but the market remained soft. Niccolò hoped that “those of the caravan (chanfila, i.e. Ar. qaéfila)” might ultimately buy some of the metal left with Ayon Susen, but in vain. There was no demand for copper plate. Buyers might eventually be found, as Niccolò was informed, if the plates were made up into rods, but the expense sounded like throwing good money after bad. By 1410, however, things seemed back to normal. The late summer brought news that Tosinghi’s leftover copper was finally about to find a buyer, and Niccolò wrote in an upbeat tone to the Barcelona sister branch that he was on the verge of bartering another 150 quintals for merchandise. He also sought to bring over to Majorca 100 quintals of copper obtained by the Valencia branch at an advantageous price. His key letter from this period is dated 16 August 1410, the very day Francesco Datini died.60 58
ASP, D. 892, Majorca-Barcelona, Datini Co., 16 (18) Dec 1408, fol. 1v. ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 28 Jan. 1409, fol. 1r. 60 ASP, D. 892, Majorca-Barcelona, Datini Co., 16 Aug. 1410, fol. 3r. See also ASP, D. 875, Florence-Barcelona, Luca del Sera to Datini Co., 23 Aug. 1410; ASP, D. 892, Majorca-Barcelona, Datini Co., 23 Sep. 1410, fol. 2r; ASP, D. 1110, Florence-Barcelona, Ser Lapo Mazzei to Datini Co., 24 Aug. 1410, in Melis, Aspetti, 76. For well-known general accounts of Francesco Datini’s death, burial, and bequests, see Melis, Aspetti, 75-7, and Iris Origo, The Merchant of 59
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To set the Majorca-Honein-Tuat metal trade into a broader context, it will be useful to review here the main European sources of copper at the turn of the century. A clear answer regarding the Datini copper provenance, however, must await the outcome of attempts to backtrace through Venice individual west-bound metal shipments. Given the nature of the firm’s correspondence with Zanobi di Taddeo Gaddi and then with the executors of his commercial estate,61 unravelling the archival leads does not hold much promise of a quick and unequivocal identification of specific mines or even intermediate markets associated with individual batches of copper demonstrably shipped to the Balearics. The present discussion remains therefore confined to outlining plausible alternatives and screening out unlikely ones in the light of current research. The Datini records offer a few interesting although not unproblematic hints. Firstly, as already mentioned, Venetian copper was clearly favoured by Honein dealers supplying the southbound transSaharan caravans. The difficulty is that while copper of varied provenances passed through both markets, Flemish and Venetian, some of the sources were identical. This was particularly true for the socalled Polish copper, which came from the mines of Slovakia and Hungary. Barring differences imparted by final refining and plate production (impossible to ascertain from the data thus far associated with the Majorca route), the intrinsic characteristics of such sharedsource metal should not in principle have diverged so widely as to affect buyer behaviour in a systematic fashion. As in the case of earlier fourteenth-century Levant tin-buyers’ reputed preference for Venetian-made rods,62 the pattern may thus reflect nothing more than the assurance of quality implied in the Venetian product’s hallmark, without saying much about preferences for copper from any given primary source. Secondly, and somewhat more usefully, the prevalence of rame in tavole in the shipments makes it likely that the metal resembled
Prato (Harmondsworth, G.B.: Peregrine Books, 1963; reprinted 1979), 341-6. 61 Zanobi died on 21 July 1400. The estate’s commissaria (with Antonio di Ser Bartolomeo and Lorenzo di Francesco di Vanni as executors and Domenico di Tommaso di Francesco della Vacca overseeing the Venetian office) carried on business on behalf of his minor male heirs (taken to Florence by their mother). For parallels between the business styles of commissaria and eredi di ... (“heirs of”), see Melis, Aspetti, 31 n.3. 62 Pegolotti, Pratica, 382.
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the yellow-hue rame afinato e messo in tavole a Vinegia described by Pegolotti more than half a century earlier.63 The hue points to a natural copper-zinc alloy containing too little zinc to be rated by contemporaries as brass. This is not at all strange, for prior to c. 1740 pure metallic zinc was for the most part neither known nor available, and varieties of brass or bronze were commonly lumped together as “copper”.64 Thirdly, the risk of coming across shipments of “sour” plate may suggest relatively arsenic-rich batches. Arsenic, as is well known, imparts greater strength to copper at high temperatures (while also raising the annealing point from 190C to around 550C), but elevated arsenic (above 0.5 per cent) embrittles the metal. Relatively zinc-rich “copper” partly flawed through inclusion of appreciable traces of arsenic certainly readily evokes the copperarsenic-antimony fahlores exploited in various parts of Europe intermittenly ever since the Early Bronze Age. The literature relating to fahlores and their prehistoric and historic exploitation is substantial and growing and there is no need to review it here, but it might nonetheless be good to recall the ores’ basic typology. Fahlore (“pale ore” or gray copper ore, Agricola’s argentum rude album (1547)) represents one of the two key groups of gray copper sulphosalts, namely the tetrahedrite group. The second is the enargite group, much less relevant here. Fahlores range in composition between the tetrahedrite and tennantite types (darker steelgray tetrahedrite (Cu,Fe)3SbS3,25 or (Cu,Fe)3AsS3,25 and lighter grayblack metallic-lustre tennantite (Cu,Ag,Fe,Zn)12As4S13). Copper may be substituted in the ores, in widely varying proportions, by a range of metals, from Fe to Ag, Bi, Co, Hg, Ni, Pb, Zn, Ge, and Sn. Zinc, silver, arsenic and antimony, in particular, as well as bismuth, tend to carry over into any unrefined metal smelted from fahlore.
63
Pegolotti, Pratica, 381. For the question of metallic zinc, see P. T. Craddock, Early Metal Mining and Production (London: Edinburgh University Press, 1995). There have been hints, however, of an unusually advanced production of zinc and of small zinc liturgical items in Bohemia in the thirteenth century. See Karel Nováæek, “Nerostné suroviny stpedovbkých Fech jako archeologický problém (bilance a perspektivy výzkumu se zambpením na výrobu a zpracování kovù),” Archeologické rozhledy 53 (2001): 279-309, and K. Charvátová, J. Valentová, and P. Charvát, “Sídlištb 13. století mezi Malínem a Novými Dvory, o. Kutná Hora,” Památky archeologické 76 (1985): 101-67. 64
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From the point of view of metal source attribution, unfortunately, the difficulty with fahlores is threefold. Firstly, fahlores are very common among almost all hydrothermal sulphide ores (e.g. mesoand epithermal deposits), in sedimentary exhalative deposits, in polymetallic veins and skarns, in veins associated with S-type granites, and often also in copper porphyry deposits, while occurring as accessory minerals in volcanogenic sulphides. Recent research has also shown that despite their reputation for poor smelting (related to modern, not pre-modern processes) fahlores were smelted in Europe far earlier than previously thought. Secondly, the chemical composition of fahlore metal is not very indicative of provenance, as it depends on the actual smelting sequence, at least with respect to arsenic and antimony content. Lead isotope ratios are a better guide, but as late as 2005 these were lacking for some areas of interest, particularly Slovakia.65 Thirdly, as R. A. Ixer pointed out in a Bronze Age context, too much work yielding geochemical and isotope data has tended to focus on notable specimens (the “magpie school of provenancing”), not on mundane orebodies smelted in the past.66 For medieval fahlore research, the greatest bottleneck lies in a certain lack of informed comprehension between archive and laboratory. The following brief survey of European copper sources is necessarily quite sweeping, given the relative prominence in all the likely extraction areas of both fahlore bodies and related secondary mineral assemblages within the upper oxidised zones (gossans). To the best of my knowledge, however, no such compact overview is readily available, or at least none bridging the recent historical and geological literature.67 Whatever its limitations, the exercise may
65
B. Höppner et al., “Prehistoric Copper Production in the Inn Valley (Austria), and the Earliest Copper in Central Europe,” Archaeometry 47 (2) (2005): 297, 306. For 2003 lead isotope data from the Erzgebirge and nearby areas, see E. Niederschlag et al., “Determination of Lead Isotope Ratios by Multiple Collector ICP–MS: A Case Study of Early Bronze Age Artefacts and their Possible Relation with Ore Deposits of the Erzgebirge,” Archaeometry 45 (2003): 61–100. 66 R. A. Ixer, “The Role of Ore Geology and Ores in the Archaeological Provenancing of Metals,” in S. M. M. Young et al., Metals in Antiquity. BAR International Series 792 (1999): 43-52; R. A. Ixer, “Copper-arsenic Ores and Bronze Age Mining and Metallurgy with Special Reference to the British Isles,” online study retrieved from http://www.goodprovenance.com. 67 Blanchard’s valuable Mining, Metallurgy and Minting, 3, Afro-European
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prove worthwhile, especially should it eventually help to spotlight otherwise inoccuous snippets of information in archival tracks concatenating from the Datini material, snippets that might permit the circle to be closed around the Venetian/Balearic trans-Saharan copper trade.68 Some of the relatively buyer-deprecated copper reaching Honein by way of Flanders in the Datini years clearly moved through Hanseatic channels (especially following the return of the Hanse Kontor to Bruges from Dordrecht in 1392, which ended the 13881392 Hanseatic boycott [Handelssperre] of Flanders). Two main supply streams merged here: Swedish and Slovak/Hungarian. The Swedish metal came, partly by way of Visby (on the island of Gotland), from Central Sweden’s massive copper sulphide deposits at Falun (Stora Kopparberget) between Lakes Runn, Varpan and St. Vällan.69 The Slovak/Hungarian metal came from areas and localities discussed further on, mainly via Kraków, the Wisla River valley (Thorn [Pol. Torux]), Lübeck and Danzig (Gdaxsk). The third source, if already worked around 1400, as tenuous indications of early smelting activity in nearby Allenbach may suggest, could have been the Hosenberg mines in the Hosenbachtal near Fischbach an der Nahe in the Hunsrück. Kupferkies and fahlore copper was easily shipped from here to the Low Countries through Cologne, Aachen, and Maastricht, at least after 1460.70 Supremacy, Part 3, “Base Metal Production,” unfortunately does not fill the gap as fully as might have been hoped for. 68 Recapitulating the orebodies in a joint historical and geological/mineralogical context may be also of some use for future metallographic and isotope work on African copper artefacts, apparently stalled as far as historical provenancing is concerned. See the “1994 Annual Report” of the Smithsonian Center for Materials Research and Education, Lead Isotope Program (at http://www.si.edu/scmre). 69 See e.g. Göran Dahlbäck, “Eisen und Kupfer, Butter und Lachs. Schwedische Produkte im hansischen Handel,” in Rolf Hammel-Kiesow, ed., Vergleichende Ansätze in der hansischen Geschichtsforschung, Hansische Studien 13 (Trier: Porta Alba Verlag, 2002), 163-74. For site analyses, soil chemistry, and brief historical overviews of Falun mining, see Elin Carlsson et al., “Historical Atmospheric Deposition in a Swedish Mining Area Traced by S Isotope Ratios in Soils,” Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 110 (1999): 103-18, and Jemt Anna Eriksson and Ulf Qvarfort, “Age Determination of the Falun Copper Mine by 14 C-datings and Palynology,” Geologiska Föreningen i Stockholm Förhandlingar 118 (1996): 43-7. 70 Hosenberg is not not far from Idar-Oberstein. The later fifteenth-century works are discussed in Rosemarie Homann et al., “Territoriale und bergbau-
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Some copper, however, may also have been brought to Flanders from the Harz Mountains, the Erzgebirge (Saxon and Bohemian Ore Ranges) or from the Saxon Erzgebirgsvorland. In the Harz (a modest 90 by 30 km northernmost outcropping of the Variscan orogen), Rammelsberg near Goslar had long been supplying northwestern Europe with copper from massive syn-sedimentary polymetallic sulfide ore formations in the local Wissenbacher slates.71 Harz mining nonetheless suffered crippling setbacks in the midfourteenth century. Both in Goslar and in the Oberharz ore extraction came to a virtual standstill after 1360, partly owing to the exhaustion of the deep veins, as well as of smaller mineral bodies in the upper oxidation layer that did not require work to a depth greater than c. 20 m and therefore not much up-front investment. This was coupled with deforestation, rising labour costs aggravated by plague mortality, shaft flooding partly compounded by climate change, and investment bottlenecks reflecting old legal and institutional patterns. Yet it is less than clear, at present, how prolonged the mining complications really were. In particular, the extent and impact of the deforestation “energy crisis” would seem to have varied notably from region to region.72 liche Grenzziehungen auf dem Hosenberg bei Fischbach/Nahe 1473-1712,” Zeitschrift für Berg- und Hüttenwesen 9 (2003), Beiheft 4. For regional context, see e.g. H. Pohl, “Die Montanunternehmer im Rheinland vom 13.-18. Jahrhundert,” in Simonetta Cavaciocchi, ed., Miniere e metallurgia. Secoli XIIIXVIII. Diciottesima Settimana di Studi, Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “F. Datini” di Prato, 11-15 aprile 1986. Atti in CD-Rom (Prato: Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica, 1999). 71 A concise overview of the relevant geology is available in H. Kulke, “Der Harz (Norddeutschland): Geologisch-Lagerstättenkundlicher Überblick, Historische Baumaterialien (Natursteine, Gipsmörtel, Schlackensteine, Blei),” Mitteilungen der Österreischen Mineralogischen Gesellschaft 142 (1997): 43-84. K. Mohr, Geologie und Minerallagerstätten des Harzes, 2d ed. (Stuttgart: E. Schweizerbart, 1993), remains an essential reference work. The standard historical works include e.g. Gerhard Laub, “Zur Technologie der Kupfergewinnung aus Rammelsberger Erzen im Mittelalter,” Harz-Zeitschrift 32 (1980): 15-76; Franz Irsigler, “Über Harzmetalle, ihre Verarbeitung und Verbreitung im Mittelalter. Ein Überblick,” in C. Meckseper, ed., Stadt im Wandel. Kunst und Kultur des Bürgertums in Norddeutschland 1150-1650 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Edition Cantz, 1985), 3: 315-21; and C.-H. Hauptmeyer, “Bergbau und Hüttenwesen im Harz während des Mittelalters,” in K. H. Kaufbold, ed., Bergbau und Hüttenwesen im und am Harz (Hannover: Hahn, 1992), 11-20. 72 The established view of the mining crisis is outlined for instance in H. Steuer, “Bergbau auf Silber und Kupfer im Mittelalter,” in H. Steuer and U. Zimmermann, eds., Alter Bergbau in Deutschland. Sonderheft of Archäologie in
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The evidence of flooding is more consistent, and there is little doubt that the Rathstiefster Stollen at Rammelsberg, for instance, could not handle peak waterflows by 1360. Moreover, known copper-rich reserves (mainly chalcopyrite, CuFeS2) in the 300 m deep Old Orebody seem to have been severely overexploited.73 In the Oberharz the Alte Mann silver/lead fields of the Clausthal-Zellerfeld area (former Celle), flourishing in the thirteenth century, were now abandoned. Those peripheral Oberharz smelting settlements that worked up Rammelsberg copper ore also declined, through a knock-on effect.74 Yet recent studies of metal traces from atmospheric deposition in the peats of the Sonnenberger Moor (Oberharz) suggest an intriguing cyclical spike of moderate importance in copper/silver processing, with a peak around 1400 (at peat layer depth c. -900 to -1,000 mm).75 A revival of activity at the turn of the century, promoted by the town of Goslar and the Welf overlords, thus appears likely. Small fahlore workings (albeit extracting mainly silver) were also active in the Mittel- and Unterharz, in the vicinity of Harzgerode Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1993; Sonderausgabe, Hamburg: Nikol Verlagsgesellschaft, 2000), 75-91. See also Christoph Bartels, Das Erzbergwerk Rammelsberg. Die Betriebsgeschichte 1924-1988 mit einem Abriß der älteren Bergbaugeschichte (Goslar: Preussag AG Metall, 1988), 15. For further aspects of the midfourteenth-century problems in the Oberharz, see Götz Alper, “Mittelalterliche Blei-/Silberverhüttung beim Johanneser Kurhaus, Clausthal-Zellerfeld (Harz),” Nachrichten aus Niedersachsens Urgeschichte 67 (1998): 87-134, and Götz Alper et al., “Johanneser Kurhaus.” Ein mittelalterlicher Blei-/Silbergewinnungsplatz bei Clausthal-Zellerfeld im Oberharz (Rahden [Westfalen]: Verlag Marie Leidorf, 2004). Revisionist approaches appear in Christoph Bartels, “Der Historische Bergbau und das Hüttenwesen im niedersächsischen Harz,” unpublished lecture, Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, 7 April 2005. For deforestation effects and charcoal supply, see e.g. M.-L. Hillebrecht, Die Relikte der Holzkohlewirtschaft als Indikatoren für Waldnutzung und Waldentwicklung. Untersuchungen an Beispielen aus Südniedersachsen (Göttingen: Goltze Druck, 1982). 73 For Rammelsberg’s two main orebodies, with clear diagrams, see D. Large and E. Walcher, “The Rammelsberg Massive Sulphide Cu-Zn-Pb-BaDeposit, Germany: An Example of Sediment-hosted, Massive Sulphide Mineralisation,” Mineralium Deposita 34 (1999): 522-38. 74 Alper, “Johanneser Kurhaus,” 94-7. 75 The deposits were studied by Burkhard Frenzel und Dr. Heike Kempter (Universität Hohenheim). The c. 1400 C.E. spike is much more modest than the one characterizing the periods 1150-1250 C.E. and c. 1500 C.E.. For methodology and caveats see Kempter’s Work Group webpage at http://www. rzuser. uni-heidelberg.de/~i12/emooremetall-index.htm, “Peat Bog Archives of Atmospheric Deposition—Ombrotrophic Peat Bogs as Archives.”
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(Hagenrode) and Neudorf, although the meagre evidence is inconclusive regarding conditions around 1400. To the east and south-east of the Harz, copper had been mined since the thirteenth century from the stillwater sediments containing the black bituminous polymetallic marl slates (shales) (Kupferschiefer) of the Mansfeld basin and the Sangerhausen Revier. Hydrothermal processes whose exact geology is still debated had left behind mainly bornite (Buntkupferkies), chalcopyrite, Kupferglanz (Cu2S), and tennantite fahlore, encased between the Zechstein conglomerate base and the overtopping Zechsteinkalk. The main early focal area lay in the north-western corner of the Mansfeld field, at the Kupferberg near Hettstedt.76 Erzgebirge copper may also have found its way into ingot batches reaching Flanders and from there the Western Mediterranean. Copper was here a companion product of silver and lead extraction from post-Variscan hydrothermal vein-type ores occurring for instance in the Freiberg gray gneiss and yielding among other copper sulphides and arsenides in association with chalcopyrite. The midfourteenth century troubles afflicting the mining sector clearly did not spare the Saxon Erzgebirge (Saxon Ore Range). Just like in the Oberharz, smaller mining operations proved relatively more vulnerable. The single archaeologically best documented settlement thus far, Bleiberg on the Treppenhauer (above the Zschopau Valley near Sachsenberg, NE of Chemnitz), was permanently abandoned at this juncture.77 How long production remained in decline in the Erz76 For an overview see Dieter Beeger, Das Sächsische Erzgebirge: Geologie, Bergbau und Kultur (Vienna: Naturhistorisches Museum, 1988), and the Ostharz chapter in Gerd Seidel, ed., Geologie von Thüringen, 2nd updated ed. (Stuttgart: Schweitzerbart, 2003); further also J. Rentzsch et al., “Die laterale Verbreitung der Erzmineral-assoziationen im deutschen Kupferschiefer,” Zeitschrift der geologischen Wissenschaften 25 (1997): 1-6. For general estimates of total copper extraction at Mansfeld from c. 1200 to 1990, see G. Knitzschke, “Metall- und Produktionsbilanz für die Kupferschieferlagerstätte im südlichen Harzvorland,” in G. Jankowski, ed., Zur Geschichte des Mansfelder Kupferschiefer-Bergbaus (Clausthal-Zellerfeld: Gesellschaft Deutscher Metallhütten- und Bergleute, 1995), 270-84. 77 W. Schwabenicky, “Hochmittelalterliche Bergstädte im sächsischen Erzgebirge und Erzgebirgsvorland,” in Siedlungsforschung: Archäologie—Geschichte —Geographie 10 (1992): 195, 206-7; W. Schwabenicky, “Der mittelalterliche Silber- Blei- und Kupferbergbau im mittleren und westlichen Erzgebirge sowie Erzgebirgsvorland unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Grabungsergebnisse vom Treppenhauer bei Sachsenburg,” Doctoral Dissertation (Berlin, 1992), 20, 22-3, 95; H. Douffet,, “Erzgebirgische Bergstädte,” in Dieter Dolgner, ed., Stadtbaukunst im Mittelalter, (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1990), 182-4.
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It is unfortunately difficult to establish, at this point, which copper types—“Polish” (i.e. Slovak), Swedish, Harzer, Erzgebirger, or eventually Hunsrücker—were most heavily traded in Bruges at any given juncture and in what proportion. Even tentative answers would help shed more light on the late fourteenth- and early fifteenthcentury trans-Saharan caravan trade’s predilection for “Venetian” as opposed to “Flemish” copper, but the issue must be left open for now. The problem is further compounded by the fact that linkages between less known mines and the commercial “catchment areas” of specific trade centers such as Bruges or Venice remain vague. This is true for instance for Bavaria’s Kupferberg in Oberfranken, near Kulmbach. Mining was probably in progress here by the 1320s, and in 1340 the works already suffered from severe flooding. The outlook possibly improved as early as 1364, but it is difficult to say whether copper from the relatively high-yield local ore travelled rather south or north-west, if indeed it possessed greater than regional importance. The detailed structure of the Venetian copper trade “catchment area” around 1400 remains correspondingly blurred. The closest regional sources lay in the upper Veneto, among the Belluno dolomite rocks, and in the Valle del Fersina (Trento, Ger. Fersental), where families of immigrant miners from the Tirol and Carinthia had settled already in the thirteenth century.80 The first securely documented copper mining operations in the Valle Imperina near Agordo (Parco Nazionale Dolomiti Bellunesi), however, date at best to the early 1400s, and given current evidence they are not very likely to have contributed much of the metal refined in Venice for shipping to the Western Mediterranean between 1390 and 1410.81 The orebodies of Austria’s Salzach Valley also do not seem a likely provenance.82 Copper, mainly from Kupferkies and fahlore, may have 80
Salvatore Piatti, Palù-Palae: frammenti di storia (Palù del Fersina: Comune di Palù del Fersina, 1996), and Anthony R. Rowley, Fersental (Val Fersina bei Trient/Oberitalien): Untersuchung einer Sprachinselmundart (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986). 81 Raffaello Vergani, “Technology and Organization of Labour in the Venetian Copper Industry (16th-18th Centuries),” Journal of European Economic History 14 (1) (1985): 173-86. 82 The relevant localities are Mühlbach am Hochkönig, Hüttau-Larzenbach (yielding Kupferkies and antimony-rich fahlore by the fourteenth century), Brenntalwald (securely documented only from 1425), and Kupferplatte (documented from 1447).
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come to Venice, however, from the Austrian Walchen and the Ober Enns Valley of north-western Styria (between Öblarn and Schladming). Inferential data suggest local mining activity from c. 1230, although clear evidence relates only to 1432-1434.83 It is unfortunately a moot poin whether the term rame dell’ene in the Frescobaldi redaction of Pegolotti’s Pratica della mercatura refers to the Enns Valley or not. If it does, the Enns would have constituted the second highest quality source of Venetian red copper, at least up to c. 1350.84 The next most prominent nearby provenance likewise raises dating issues. The dolomite and limestone fahlore mineralizations of the Schwaz-Brixlegg area and adjacent orebodies (e.g. Falkenstein, Klein- and Großkogel) in the Unterinntal (some 40 km north-east of Innsbruck) appear to fit the mixed characteristics of the Venetian copper in tavole quite well. The local ores do contain significant concentrations of zinc. The smelting of secondary copper minerals in the host rock would have given a copper rich in arsenic and antimony, while metal with relatively low arsenic, antimony and sulphur (“sweet” copper) could have come from a mixture of fahlores and secondary copper minerals containing nickel.85 Such variation would not be suprising during early mining stages, before shafts and galleries were driven deeper. But although fahlores were worked extensively here during the Bronze Age, tradition cites only 1409 for the rediscovery of outcroppings, a year later than the commonly accepted date of the Schladminger Brief that became the basis of Tyrol’s mining law. According to the Schwazer Bergchronik, the Falkenstein veins were opened in 1420, attracting the first large wave 83
Gerald Fuchs, “Montanarchäologische Untersuchungen in der Walchen bei Öblarn,” Report—ARGIS Archäologie Service (http://www.argis.at). See also Karl A. Redlich, “Die Walchen bei Öblarn. Ein Kiesbergbau im Ennsthal,” Berg- und Hüttenmännisches Jahrbuch 51 (1903): 1-62; Hans Jörg Köstler, “Neuzeitliches Montanwesen im Bezirk Liezen,” in Bergbau und Hüttenwesen im Bezirk Liezen (Steiermark). Kleine Schriften der Abteilung Schloß Trautenfels am Steiermärkischen Landesmuseum Joanneum (Trautenfels: Verein Schloß Trautenfels, 1993), 24, 69-75, 78; J. Wichner, “Kloster Admont und seine Beziehungen zum Bergbau und zum Hüttenbetrieb,” Berg- und Hüttenmännisches Jahrbuch 39 (1891): 111, 129-30, 135-6, 142-3, 146, 149, 153-4. For the mineralogy see Heinz J. Unger, “Der Schwefel- und Kupferkiesbergbau in der Walchen bei Öblarn im Ennstal,” Archiv für Lagerstättenforschung in den Ostalpen 7 (1968): 2-52. 84 Pegolotti, Pratica, 381. 85 Höppner, “Copper Production,” 301.
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of miners from Bohemia, Saxony, and elsewhere, and the still viable old works in the Alte Zeche orebody were rediscovered in Schwaz only in 1426.86 On the face of it, Inn Valley copper thus enters into play too late to fit the Datini timeframe. On the other hand, much older (prehistoric) mines are known to have existed at the top of the Schwaz deposits (Schwabboden and Eiblschrofen), but unfortunately many of the locations have been obliterated or made inaccessible in the giant rockslide of 1999. Secondly, the recorded Schwaz chronology fits all too closely a pattern of single-date eponymous “rediscovery” almost simultaneous with legislative ordering. Such patterns typically serve to formalize in human memory more drawn-out processes, in this case perhaps distorted by the fact that the eyecatching element was silver, not the much more mundane copper. Inn Valley copper may well have traded in Venice at the end of the fourteenth century, just a few years before the farm maid Gertrud Kandlerin drove out to pasture the legendary bull who by accident rooted up some silver ore. The 1409 “find” is quite likely to have been preceded by a good few decades of prospecting and small-scale smelting in which copper would have been the most obvious product suited to cover the costs of searching for silver. Should this scenario prove correct, then some of the copper refined by the makers of Venetian tavole di rame in the 1390s and early 1400s could indeed have been extracted from either the Schwaz dolomite primary ores (arsenical argentiferous tetrahedrite with a generic formula (Cu,Ag)10Zn2(As,Sb)4S13, from the Brixlegg area Triassic limestone tennantite (with a generic formula (Cu,Ag,Fe,Zn)12As4S13), or from other nearby rock formations contain-
86
For background see Robert Krauß, “Kupfer und Silber—ein verlorener Reichtum,” in Schwazer Silber—vergeudeter Reichtum? 1. Internationales Bergbausymposium Schwaz 2002 (Schwaz: Berenkamp, 2003), 139-42; Lothar Suhling, “Rattenberger und Schwazer Schmelzen auf Silber und Kupfer vor und um 1500. Zu den Verhüttungsverfahren nach Quellen des späten 15. und frühen 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Schwazer Silber, 209-24. Concerning the Brief, see Karl Stadlober, “Der Schladminger Bergbrief,” Res Montanarum 30 (2003): 5-10. The Schladminger Bergbrief of Lienhart der Egkzlhaim, Richter zu Slennig, of course poses challenges of its own, given that the 1764 edited text is dated “nach Christi Geburde dreyzehenhundert Jahr, und in dem achtenden Jahr an Montag nach St. Margärethe Tag,” i.e. 1308 and not 1408 as commonly accepted.
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ing fahlore. Further research into possible pre-1409 copper mining in the Inn Valley is necessary. This leaves as an acknowledged and much less problematic source of Venetian exports the “Hungarian” Slovak copper, which also flowed into Hanseatic trade channels through Poland, as already noted. The metal normally reached Venice along three alternative routes: (a) the so-called Pettauer Weg (through Ptuj on the Drava River) across the Karst to Trieste; (b) the Semmeringstraße, with Vienna as transit hub; and (c) the road from Buda to Croatia’s Zagreb and then to the port of Senj (It. Segna) (opposite the island of Krk, in the Velebitski Kanal (Canale della Morlacca, also known as della Montagna, on the landward side of the Kvarnericá Embayment), and from there by ship to the Venetian lagoon.87 The three
87 Günther Frh. v. Probszt, Die niederungarischen Bergstädte. Ihre Entwicklung und wirtschaftliche Bedeutung bis zum Übergang an das Haus Habsburg (1546) (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1966), 260-1, and Z. Pál Pach, “Die Verkehrsroute des Levantehandels nach Siebenbürgen und Ungarn zur Zeit der Könige Ludwig von Anjou und Sigismund von Luxemburg,” in Werner Mägdefrau, ed., Europäische Stadtgeschichte in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Weimar: Böhlaus, 1979), 60-91. For the old toponymy around Senj, see e.g. the IIId Military Mapping Survey of Austria-Hungary, 1:200,000 (sheet 33-45, “Zengg”). The late fourteenth century Venetian link has been recently highlighted in depth by Martin SŠtefánik, “Pramene o banskobystrickej medi v Benátkach z druhej polovice 14. storocšia,” in Štúdie z dejín baníctva a banského podnikania. Zborník k zšivotnému jubileu Mariána Skladaného (Studien zur Bergbau- und Bergunternehmengeschichte. Festschrift für Marián Skladaný zum 60. Geburtstag), Acta historica posoniensia I, ed. Miroslav Danisš (Bratislava: Katedra vsšeobecných dejin FF UC, 2001), 48–63. See also Martin SŠtefánik, “Kupfer aus dem ungarischen Königreich im Spiegel der venezianischen Senatsprotokollen im 14. Jahrhundert,” in R. Tasser and E. Westermann, eds., Der Tiroler Bergbau und die Depression der europäischen Montanwirtschaft im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert. Akten der internationalen bergbaugeschichtlichen Tagung Steinhaus. Veröffentlichungen des Südtiroler Landesarchivs 16 (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2004), 210–26, and Martin SŠtefánik, “Pramene k stredovekým dejinám Uhorska a Slovenska v benátskom archíve,” Slovenská archivistika 39 (2004): 40-58. For the VenetianHungarian historical and commercial context from 1409-1412 onward, just astride and beyond the present study’s time limits, see W. von Stromer, “Die Kontinentalsperre Kaiser Sigismunds gegen Venedig 1412-1413, 1418-1433 und die Verlagerung der Transkontinentalen Transportwege,” in A. V. Marx, ed., Trasporti e sviluppo economico, secoli XIII-XVIII, Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “F. Datini” di Prato, no. 5 (Florence, 1986), 61-84, and Martin Štefánik, Obchodná vojna krála ZŠigmunda proti Benátkam (Handelskrieg König Sigismunds gegen Venedig) (Bratislava: Historický Ústav SAV, 2004), which usefully expands the relevant sections of the well-known Elemér Mályusz, Kaiser Sigismund in Ungarn, 1387-1437 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990).
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routes carried both raw copper (probably Schwarzkupfer) and refined metal (“afinato in Ungheria”).88 The Slovak orebodies were located in two discrete zones in the Western Carpathian (Západné Karpaty) geological sub-province of the extensive Carpatho-Balkan metallogenic area.89 The first one, Central Slovakia, supplied copper mainly from two regions: (a) the Veporské Vrchy, forming part of the Veporské Pásmo geological belt (locality of Mubietová [Lybetha, Ger. Libethen]), and (b) the Starohorské Vrchy, an extension of the DŠumbierské Tatry portion of the Lower Tatra (Nízké Tatry) mountain chain (town of Banská Bystrica [Ger. Neusohl, Hung. Besztercebánya]). Both of these extraction and smelting centres ranked in the early fifteenth century among the key members of the so-called niederungarischen Bergstädte (the mining towns of Lower Hungary: Kremnica, Banská Štiavnica, Banská Bystrica, Nová Banša, Pukanec, Mubietová and, a little later on, Banská Belá).90 Mubietová is located geologically in the north-eastern sector of the Central Slovakia Neogene Volcanic Field, between Banská Bystrica and the cone and fluvial apron of the Pomana andesite stratovolcano and to the north-east of the giant Štiavnica stratovolcano of almost 50 km in diameter, with a 20 km caldera (16.4 to 10.5 million years ago). The c. 6 km broad Mubietová mineral zone lines the north-western edge of the Veporské Vrchy, between Podbrezová
88
E.g. ASP, D. 549, Venice-Pisa, Zanobi di Taddeo Gaddi to Datini Co., 8 Aug. 1393, fol. 1r. 89 S. Jankovicá, “The Carpatho-Balkanides and Adjacent Area: A Sector of the Tethyan Eurasian Metallogenic Belt,” Mineralium Deposita 32 (1997): 42633, and in particular 430. 90 Originally the towns were only six: Banská Belá joined them in 1453, and the usual blanket mentions of “seven mining towns” are thus inaccurate. Useful regional overviews are found in Miroslav Kamenický, “Baníctvo v stredoslovenskej banskej oblasti,” Historický cšasopis 45 (1997): 173-4; see also Stefan Kazimir, “Zur Versorgung mittelslowakischer Bergstädte mit Nahrungsmitteln und anderen Verbrauchsgütern vom 14. bis 18. Jahrhundert. Reflexionen über dauerhafte Elemente in der langen Frist,” in Ekkehard Westermann, ed., Bergbaureviere als Verbrauchszentren im vorindustriellen Europa. Fallstudien zu Beschaffung und Verbrauch von Lebensmitteln sowie Roh- und Hilfsstoffen (13.-18. Jahrhundert) (Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Beihefte, 130) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997), 295-305. A handy tool for place name concordances are the 1900-1914 topographic maps of the IIId Military Mapping Survey of Austria-Hungary, 1:200,000 (sheets 37-49 “Neusohl”; 38-49 “Leutschau”; 39-49 “Kassa (Kaschu)”).
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and Mubietová (partly in the CŠiereazš mountain chain).91 The first written records of local mining activity date to c. 1340. Recognized as a community c. 1350 and endowed with the SŠtiavnica Bergrecht (Schemnitzer recht) in 1379, Mubietová produced fine copper (ranked so at least in the seventeenth century) rivalling that of neighbouring Banská Bystrica.92 Trivial amounts of the fourteenth-century metal may have come from upper oxidation zones with inclusions of cuprite (Cu2O) and low impurity copper, but the primary ores consisted of base-metal sulphides (mainly chalcopyrite), with associated tetrahedrite, tennantite, arsenopyrite, and siderite.93 The three key copper deposits, within 1 to 6.5 km of the settlement, were located at Podlipa, Svätodusšná, and Kolba. Copper mining began to wane gradually in the seventeenth century, and all work ceased in 1863. In Banská Bystrica, the core zone of medieval copper and silver extraction lay north of the town, in the SŠpania Dolina, under the Pánský Diel peak (in the Vallis dominorum, Ger. Herrengrund valley), and in the the Staré Hory hills (Ger. Altgebirg, localities of Richtárová and Piesky [Ger. Sandberg]).94 Intrusion-related and epithermal vein precious metal/base metal mineralizations associated with calcalkaline rocks are usually identified as the economically viable metal source here, with richer copper content in greater depth on base metal veins. The degree of medieval exploitation of porphyry/skarn copper deposits remains unclear.95 The polymetallic works at Poniky J. Lexa, J. SŠtohl and V. Konecšný, “The Banská SŠtiavnica Ore District: Relationship Between Metallogenetic Processes and the Geological Evolution of a Stratovolcano,” Mineralium Deposita 34 (1999): 639-54. 92 Martina Kalabová, “Venné majetky uhorských královien v stredoslovenskej banskej oblasti do roku 1478,” Historický cšasopis 52 (2004): 3-30, sets Mubietová and Banská Bystrica into a broader historical and administrative context, mainly after 1405. See also V. Bolerázsky, “Príspevok k vzniku a najstarším dejinám slobodného královského banského mesta Mubietová,” Historický zborník kraja 4 (1968): 363–8. 93 Too much economic significance should not be attributed to the secondary mineral libethenite (Cu2[(OH)PO4]) from the local oxidation zone, first described in 1823 on the basis of samples from the abandoned works at Mubietová, even though it alone was mentioned in the context of pre-modern local mining by Probszt, Die niederungarischen Bergstädte, 252. 94 J. Mazúrek, “Tazšobný prírodno-technický systém v banskej oblasti SŠpania Dolina—Staré Hory,” in Stredné Slovensko—Prírodné vedy [Stredoslovenské muzeum, Banská Bystrica] 8 (1989): 23-68. For useful local observations see Josef Marko, “Altgebirg—Bergbau- und Wallfahrtsort,” Karpaten Jahrbuch 53 (2002) [2001]: 156-9. 95 The geology of the SŠtiavnica, Javorie, Pomana and Vtácšnik volcanic 91
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(Drienok, Predbane) (c. 12 km ESE of Banská Bystrica) were more important as a source of silver, lead and zinc than of copper, generally present in uneconomic concentrations. The local copper ores include mainly chalcopyrite and occasional small veins of tennantite, in dolomite and in Triassic limestone. Exploitation largely stopped c. 1609. It is uncertain whether the chalcopyrite, tennantite and tetrahedrite ores east of Drienok, in the area of Ponická Lehôtka and Farbisšte (in the direction of Mubietová) were at all exploited in the middle ages. Hitherto documented mining and prospecting activity seems to date only from the later eighteenth century.96 The Central Slovak mining zone was economically cross-connected by the 1380s with the second discrete source zone, Eastern Slovakia, through verleger activities and the ownership of mining-shares in Banská Bystrica by eastern merchants from the Spisš (Ger. Zips) area. Located in the Spisšsko-Gemerské Rudohorie and conjoined formations (Slánske Hory—Hungarian Tokaj Mountains), the most significant Eastern Slovak extraction centres coalesced in the league of Upper Hungarian mining towns (oberungarischen Bergstädte), which included Gelnica, Smolník, Rudabánya, Jasov, Telkibánya, Rozšnšava, and Spisšská Nová Ves.97 The oldest and most prestigious mining hub was Gelnica (Hnilec, Hung. Gölniczbánya), often simply referred to as “The Mine” (Bánya, Bana). A local shift from an earlier emphasis on precious metal extraction to the exploitation of copper and iron can be dated to the 1360s, and by the end of the fourteenth century Spisš (Zipser) copper had carved out a competitive niche in northern European markets. Smolník (Hung. Szmolnokbánya, Ger. Schmöllnitz), located to the south-west of Gelnica, in the area of the Volovské Vrchy (Volovec, Ger. Ochsenberg), lay closest to the most significant copper deposits. mineral-bearing zones is covered in Lexa et al., “Banská SŠtiavnica Ore District,” 641 (Fig. 4). Regarding skarn deposits see ibid., 648-9. 96 For contextual area geology see e.g. M. Slavkay and M. Chovan, “A Review of Metallic ore Mineralization of the Nízké Tatry Mts.,” in P. Grecula, ed., Variscan Metallogeny in the Alpine Orogenic Belt, Mineralia Slovaca monograph (Bratislava: Geocomplex, 1996), 239-50. 97 As general background see e.g. Rainer Slotta, “Das Slowakische Erzgebirge und seine Denkmäler,” in R. Slotta et al., eds., ‘Bei diesem Schein kehrt Segen ein’. Gold, Silber und Kupfer aus dem Slowakischen Erzgebirge, Veröffentlichungen aus dem Deutschen Bergbau-Museum Bochum 69 (Bochum, 1997), 71-96.
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The copper came from massive beds of chalcopyrite and pyrite in metamorphic dark schists layered with alkaline volcanic rock, with some admixture of arsenopyrite, tetrahedrite, sphalerite (ZnS) and galena. Smellenczer kopper and its regional complements from Gelnica and elsewhere loomed large among the Slovak and Hungarian metal exports and enjoyed a solid reputation. Smolník received urban rights in 1327, higher criminal justice rights in 1339, and by 1338 was already expanding its communal authority to the outlying communities of SŠvedlár (Ger. Schwedler) to the north and Mnísšek nad Hnilcom (Hung. Meczenzéf) to the east. The source of the socalled Stillbacher kopper, Tichá Voda (Ger. Stillbach, WNW of Smolník), was administratively annexed by Smolník in 1344. Until the 1360s, and thus before the Datini period, another nearby source of copper was exploited at Rudnšany (on the Mešdešný Potok stream, Ger. Kufurbach or Kupperbach).98 To conclude, it is necessary to put the Venetian/Majorcan copper trade into a broader quantitative perspective. Aggregate figures for Slovak copper output prior to the period of the early Fugger-Thurzo partnership (1494-1525) are scarce.99 According to some estimates, Smolník produced c. 182 tons of copper per annum during the first third of the fifteenth century.100 Other tentative figures are available for the operations of Nürnberg merchants, mainly based in Banská Bystrica. The local orebodies yielded c. 2,000-2,500 zentners of refined copper and c. 8,000-10,000 zentners of Schwarzkupfer in the early fifteenth century, shipped mostly to Venice, plus perhaps around 2,500 zentners of copper sold directly to Nürnberg.101 This 98 Eugen Kladivík, “Zur Geschichte des Edel- und Buntmetallbergbaus im slowakischen Erzgebirge,” Der Anschnitt 50 (1998), 13-19; Ivan Hercko, “Die Gold-, Silber- und Kupfererzlagerstätten im Slowakischen Erzgebirge,” in Slotta et al., Bei diesem Schein, 19-27; Mubomír Juck, “Výsady banských miest na Slovensku v stredoveku,” in Marsina, Banské mestá, 95, 98-9; Ivan Chalupecký, “Postavenie banského majstra vo východoslovenských banských mestách v 15.16. storocší,” in Marsina, Banské mestá, 141; Michal Popovicš, “K 655. výrocšiu baníctva v Rudnšanoch,” in Marsina, Banské mestá, 210. 99 Marián Skladaný, “Prvé turzovsko-fuggerovské zmluvy o spolocšnom mediarskom podniku,” Historický cšasopis 43 (2) (1995): 215-29. 100 Vladimír Segeš, “Stredoveké mestá na Slovensku. Tepny spolocšenského pokroku,” História. Revue o dejinách spolocšnosti 1 (4) (2001): 6-9. 101 W. von Stromer, “Nürnberger Unternehmer im Karpatenraum. Ein oberdeutsches Buntmetall-Oligopol 1396-1412,” Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej 16 (4) (1968): 641-62; idem., “Das Zusammenspiel oberdeutscher und Florentiner Geldleute bei der Finanzierung von König Ruprechts Italien-
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amounts respectively to 100-125, 400-500 and another 125 metric tons (taking a standard zentner of 110.23 pounds avoirdupois, equivalent to 0.05 metric tons)—overall some 625 to 750 tons over what seems to have been a six-year extraction run. Assuming the capacity of Banská Bystrica, Mubietová, Gelnica, and Smolník together with its dependencies to be a conservative 120 tons per annum each (no more than a guess based on the current data ranges), the yearly output may have reached c. 480 tons around 1400. As a working average, the 400 to 500 ton mark is not at all unreasonable. The readily accessible quinquennial aggregates for Central European copper production compiled by John Munro suggest that a century later, when the Thurzo-Fugger partnership was on the upswing, output hovered in the range of 396 tons per annum in 1491-1495, 541 tons in 1496-1500, and 608 tons in 1501-1505. At their peak, the early sixteenth-century aggregate figures resolve to c. 1093 tons per annum (1511-1515). The corresponding annual exports to Antwerp and Venice were 194 and 60 tons. At the initial documented low point (1496-1500), these exports stood at 14.5 tons (Antwerp) and 89 tons (Venice).102 The Munro aggregates, ostensibly of an order of magnitude matching quite well the tentative late fourteenth- to early fiftenth-century outputs given above, might in fact be on the low side as far as Slovakia is concerned, for they seem to cover a broader range of sources than just the core Slovak orebody areas. But, be this as it may, a comparison with the documented volumes of Datini era Venetian copper exports to the Western Mediterranean is useful. The Venice-Majorca-Tuat circuit, as we have seen, was able to absorb between 20 to 80 tons of copper in one trading season through the Datini network alone, and it was normal to see sales
feldzug, 1401/2,” in Hermann Kellenbenz, ed., Öffentliche Finanzen und privates Kapital im späten Mittelalter und in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Bericht über die 3. Arbeitstagung der Gesellschaft für Sozial- u. Wirtschaftsgeschichte in Mannheim (Forschungen z. Sozial- u. Wirtschaftsgeschichte 16) (Stuttgart, 1971), 50-86. For the activities of the Kammerer-Seiler and Flextorfer-Zenner companies, see also Blanchard, “Egyptian Specie Markets,” 392, in this volume. 102 John Munro, “The Monetary Origins of the ‘Price Revolution’: South German Silver Mining, Merchant-Banking, and Venetian Commerce, 14701540,” Department of Economics and Institute for Policy Analysis, University of Toronto, Working Paper No. 8 (UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-99-02) (rev. 21 March 2003), 44 (Table 4).
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of 2.5 to 9 metric ton batches per single Venetian supplier. The emerging pattern also seems to suggest that at least half the amount shipped to Honein was indeed carried south, in a good year, using an annual trans-Saharan caravan to the Tuat and the Niger Bend. This is the realm of actual transactions. When it comes to contemporary estimates, Niccolò di Giovanni Mazzuoli argued in 1406 that as far as prospects for Datini sales were concerned the Honeinmarket should be deemed worth about 1,000 quintals of Ghas. sa . é s. sa . copper yearly, or about 40 metric tons.103 A realistic although somewhat conservative guess, Niccolò’s estimate lies in a “sweet spot” between the documented low and high figures from the Datini letters and ledgers. To reach an overall impression of the potential annual demand for copper re-exported from Venice in 1400-1410, one would have gateway as to take the c. 40 ton capacity of the Honein-Ghas. sa . é s. sa . a starting point, and add the hitherto unknown aggregate demand of the Iberian market (Spain and Portugal), the rest of Italy, and the Levant (mainly Egypt).104 In the realm of pure conjecture, had each of these been able to absorb a mere 20-30 tons (surely an underestimate), Venice would have had to supply 100-130 tons of copper annually to satisfy these Mediterranean outlets. This would have been just 30 to 60 tons shy of a full one third of the conjectural output of the Slovak copper mines around the year 1400. Slovak copper, however, also travelled in sizeable quantities to Nürnberg, Poland, and the Low Countries. The conclusion that seems to impose itself, therefore, is that in years such as 1409, when the Datini correspondence documents a drastic temporary disruption
103
ASP, D. 998, Majorca-Valencia, Datini Co., 23 Jul. 1406, fol. 1r. The quantities of copper imported to Egypt in the fifteenth century, partly to feed the mints’ production of copper coinage, have been generally rated as very large or “astounding.” See Lane and Mueller, Money and Banking, 1: 560; Boaz Shoshan, “From Silver to Copper: Monetary Change in Fifteenth Century Egypt,” Studia Islamica 56 (1982): 97-116. Boaz Shoshan, “Money Supply and Grain Prices in Fifteenth-Century Egypt,” The Economic History Review, NS, 36 (1) (1983): 61-2 operated, however, with a starkly simplified and no longer applicable outline of the Central European “mining crisis” (1350-1450), ignoring the Slovak mines. For aspects of the VenetianByzantine-Egyptian copper trade in the late 1430s, see e.g. Cécile Morrisson, “Coin Usage and Exchange Rates in Badoer’s Libro dei Conti,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001): 217-45. 104
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in the flow of Slovak/Hungarian copper to Venice,105 other sources would have had to fill the gap. Which alternates played this role at any given point remains an open question—and so does the issue of whether we might have to move back to the late fourteenth century the beginning of effective and sustained copper extraction at Schwaz, Brixlegg, Fersina and Imperina, or other orebody locations typically associated only with fifteenth-century advances in mining technology.
105
ASP, D. 930, Venice-Barcelona, Lamberti to Datini Co., 3 Aug. 1409, quoted in Lane and Mueller, Money and Banking, 1: 562.
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APPENDIX The following is a transcription of what may be considered the quintessential “Tuat” letter from the Datini archive in Prato. For consistency, the transcription norms are those adopted for the Majorcan carteggio in Giampiero Nigro’s Mercanti in Maiorca, but expanded abbreviations are marked here in italics and lacunae in square brackets. ASP, D. 668, Majorca-Florence, Datini Co. to Francesco Datini, 25 Mar. 1408 Al nome di Dio, a dì 25 d’marzo 1408 Scrittovi a dì passati il bisongno. Dipoi n’abiamo 2 vostre, che ll’una chontiene quello che l’altra. Faremo risposta al bisongno. Quanto dite del vostro rame abiamo inteso. Mai non potemo sapere a punto quanto si pesò in Vinega il vostro, né quanto quel’ d’Antonio d’Lapacc[i]o, che se l’avesimo saputo l’aremo partito: ora c’era detto d’chostà a uno modo, e da Barzalona c’era detto innaltro, e ora utimamente quando avemo il vostro conto ce’l disono innaltro modo, or noi l’abbiamo achonco chome c’avete detto, che dite dovete avere lb. 2108 s. 4 e Lapacc[i]o lb. 363 s. 6. Caschuno abbiamo fatto creditore chome dite. Quando que’ d’Valenza ci chonterano le spese arano fatte per voi e per Lapacc[i]o partiremo a caschuno la sua erata e ve n’aviseremo. Abiamo avisato Lucha chome abiamo rimetuto per voi in più partite a Barzalona a nostri reali 500, che ve n’a[b]ia[n] avisato. Tutti sono a vostro conto. E ora novellamente n’abiamo rimesso reali 250 a s. 14 d. 8 1/2 per reale, anche ne gl’abiamo avisati. Da lloro l’arete saputo. Chome verremo rischotendo, di fatto rimetteremo. Non vi maravigl[i]ate perché si risquuoti [sic] chosí a stento, che questi che chonperarono il chovero lo mandavano a Tuet e una chonpagn[i]a d’Ar[a]bi l’àn[n]o tutto rubato e stavasi sopra rischato, che pens[i]amo alla g[i]ornata d’ogi sia rischattato. Ongni dì ci s’atende una nave da Une, che sapremo chome sarà rischattato. Dio ne li tragha cho’ meno dano si può, e simile il Tosingho, che per reali 600 n’è stato rubato del suo chon quello d’Antonio d’Quinto, che per reali 2000 vi sono tra l’Tosingho e l’Quinto, che l’Tosingho v’è per 2/7 e Anto[nio] d’Quinto per 5/7. Siate avisati. Delle 14 balle ch’abbiamo qui di vostro niente si truova da fare per anchora. Chome vedremo da darli fine lo faremo. Noi n’abiamo fidato 1 chostale a uno giudeo che ll’à mandato in certo luogho in Barberia per provare: se gl’verà ben fatto prenderà d’altro. Lb. 9 1/2 gl’abiamo contato il chintale. Siate avisati. Voi dite vero che da reali 76 e s. 0 [s. sum blank in text] restate avere del chonto da noi a voi. Noi restamo avere d’Andrea Riera per 2 vostre
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sanghuinee gli vendemo più tempo fa reali 61 s. 0 [s. sum blank in text], e d’altra banda dovavamo avere per lo chonto tinto reali 18 e s. 0 [s. sum blank in text], siché sarebe intorno alla somma del chonto. Ne siamo pressoché paghati delle sanghuinee: siamo per torre vino biancho dal detto e rivenderlo, che miglore vale dal mal paghatore prenderne quello che l’uomo può che perdere tutto; ma l’amicho c’è l’huole tropo sopramettere. Nondimeno noi faremo il migl[i]ore che potremo per paura d’non perdere tutto, che indug[i]o pigl[i]a vizio. Della morte d’Giovanni Tosinghi ci pesa asai: non si può più che Dio voglia. Dio abi miserichordia della sua anima. Altra volta tocherà a noi, e chosí ci trametiamo. Dio il sa la faticha abiamo durato nello sparviere vi mandavamo, che se l’avessi auto salvo n’aresti auto gran piacere. Mai vidi il più ardente, e ora n’abbiamo donato uno a Pagholo Biliotti e dettoli si richordi d’voi, alle quagle fateglele richordante [sic] ch’è un bel dono. Per questa non vegiamo che più dirvi al presente. Christo vi ghuardi. Francescho e Christofano in Maiolicha
THE BORROMEI BANK RESEARCH PROJECT1 Francesco Guidi Bruscoli James L. Bolton
The Borromei family The Borromei were Tuscan by origin, from the town of San Miniato al Tedesco, located between Florence and Pisa. After a failed rebellion against Florentine rule in 1370, when Filippo di Lazzaro Borromei was hanged as one of the ringleaders, they fled the town and settled in other parts of Italy. By the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, there were three main branches of the family, one in Milan, a second in Venice and a third in Florence. There were also major banking companies in all three places headed by a member or members of the family.2 1 The Borromei Bank Research Project came into existence on 1 July 2001, following a successful application to the Economic and Social Research Council made by Professor James L. Bolton (Award R000239125). Dr Francesco Guidi Bruscoli joined on 1 January 2002. The main outcome of the project will be the publication of a study of the activity of the Borromei companies in the North of Europe in the first half of the fifteenth century, accompanied by a CD-ROM containing a database with all the information contained in the two ledgers kept by Borromei companies in London (1436-1439) and Bruges (1438). This is possible because in November 2000 permission was granted to the Project by Principessa Bona Borromeo-Arese for the exclusive use of the ledgers and other allied material for research and publication. In order to create the database, specific software (Historic Accounts I®) was developed by Roundhouse Software of Winchester. This piece of software can be used for any ledger or account book kept in double entry and in money of account, medieval, modern or contemporary. It will be marketed, under licence, by Queen Mary and Roundhouse Software. Another piece of software (Historic Accounts Enquiry®) was constructed, also by Roundhouse Software, for the navigation of the database and will be inbuilt in the CD-ROM. This paper is the result of research and analysis undertaken jointly by Dr Francesco Guidi Bruscoli and Prof. James L. Bolton. However, paragraphs 1, 3 and 4 were written by Guidi Bruscoli and paragraph 2 by Bolton. 2 Unfortunately no comprehensive study of the family exists for the period with which we are concerned. If not otherwise stated, information on members of the family for this period (with different degrees of detail and of reliability) has been drawn from Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960), 13: by name (in particular essays by Giorgio Chittolini and Florence Edler de Roover at pp. 45-46, 48-49, 53-55, 63-64, 72-75); Piero Canetta, La famiglia Borromeo (Milano: Tamburini, 1937); Pompeo Litta, “Borromei di S. Mini-
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Milan. Before 1393, Borromeo and Giovanni, sons of Filippo di Lazzaro, had established a very profitable business in Milan that was to last until at least 1450. They owed much of their initial success to service to the Visconti dukes. Giovanni was for some time Treasurer General of the city and his nephew and adopted son and heir Vitaliano was also ducal Treasurer at various times between 1418 and 1430.3 He and his uncle made loans to the Visconti in anticipation of taxation and in return obtained widespread privileges, fiefs and estates, most notably around Lake Maggiore, to the north-west of the city. Florence. Another branch of the family, the descendants of Bartolomeo di Francesco, settled in Pisa soon after the expulsion from San Miniato and by 1395 Ludovico, Francesco and Piero di Bartolomeo had their own company there. The partnership was dissolved when Francesco moved to Genoa in 1404, and around 1409 Ludovico and Piero were allowed to return to Florence. This important Florentine branch of the family has largely been ignored by genealogists and historians and it is hard to place it correctly in the family’s genealogical tree. In 1420 Piero Borromei was Treasurer ato,” in Famiglie celebri italiane (Milan: Typ. del dottore G. Ferrario, 1819-1874), 4: by name. For manuscript sources, see: Archivio Borromeo, Isola Bella (ABIB), in particular Box file 661 and Box file 1051; and Archivio di Stato, Florence (ASF), Manoscritti 593, Carte Pucci, sc. III, folders 14, 25; ASF, Ceramelli Papiani 915; ASF, Catasto, 81, fols. 508r-513r; ASF, Catasto 405, fols. 78-84. For the Borromei companies until the beginning of the fifteenth century, see Federigo Melis, La banca pisana e le origini della banca moderna, ed. Marco Spallanzani (Florence: Le Monnier, 1987), in particular 224-32; for the 1420s, 1430s and 1440s see Girolamo Biscaro, “Il banco Filippo Borromei e compagni di Londra (1436-1439),” Archivio Storico Lombardo, ser. 4, 19, anno 40 (1913): 37-126, 283-386; Tommaso Zerbi, Le origini della partita doppia (Milano: Marzorati, 1952), 311-68, 413-46; Patrizia Mainoni, Mercanti lombardi tra Barcellona e Valenza nel basso medioevo (Bologna: Cappelli, 1982), 90-110; Philip Jacks and William Caferro, The Spinelli of Florence. Fortunes of a Renaissance Merchant Family (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 39-51. In the family archive at Isola Bella there are eight surviving ledgers for Borromei companies across Europe: Mastri n. 4 and 5 for Giovanni Borromei & Co. of Milan (1427, 1428); n. 7 for Filippo Borromei & Co. of London (1436-1439), which will be here referred to as BLo; n. 8 for Filippo Borromei & Co. of Bruges (1438), which will be referred to as BBr; n. 9, 10, 11 and 12 for Filippo Borromei & Co. of Milan (1445, 1446, 1451-52, 1453-55). This is a brief account of the family’s history because the main focus of this paper lies elsewhere. A more detailed study of the family and its banking companies will appear in the forthcoming volume. 3 The transcription of one of the ledgers kept by Vitaliano Borromei as ducal Treasurer has been published: Pier Giacomo Pisoni, ed., Liber tabuli Vitaliani Bonromei: mastro contabile del tesoriere ducale Vitaliano Borromeo (1426-1430) (Intra, Verbania: Alberti, 1995).
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of Bologna, following a loan of 15,000 florins to Pope Martin V, and in the same year he was dealing with iron mines in Elba.4 The Florentine Catasto of 1427 shows Giuliano di Piero with assets of about 21,000 florins and Tommaso di Matteo [?] with less than 2,400. Corporate activities in Florence continued in the names of Piero di Bartolomeo and Gabriello di Lodovico, then of Gabriello, followed by Gabriello and Benedetto di Lodovico and eventually, after 1425, of Antonio (? di Lodovico). During these years there may have been yet another Borromei company there, in association with Antonio Corbinelli. Piero di Bartolomeo also became a partner in Galeazzo di Borromeo Borromei & Co. of London, which had recently been established by the Venetian branch of the family. Venice. By 1395 Alessandro di Filippo Borromei had already created a company in Venice together with Domenico d’Andrea, a Venetian citizen of Sienese origin. By 1422 the partnership had changed and become Alessandro Borromei and Lazzaro di Giovanni & Co., the latter being originally from Volterra in Tuscany. During the 1420s, it was this branch which showed most signs of vitality. Around 1420 Galeazzo, nephew of Alessandro di Filippo, created two companies in the north of Europe, in Bruges and London, both in partnership with Antonio di Francesco. Unfortunately hardly anything is known about them, nor about Alessandro’s activity in Venice.5 However, they must have been very successful, because in the Florentine Catasto of 1427 Alessandro was the fourth richest man in the city, being assessed at 57,000 florins, 50,725 of them in luoghi of the Monte Comune (shares of the public debt) and the rest in houses, shops and pieces of land. At his death in 1431, his three nephews, Galeazzo, Antonio and Giovanni, inherited all this wealth, along with shares in the Venetian, Bruges and London companies. In the mid-1430s the Venetian branch of the family also established its own company in Florence, under the name of Galeazzo and Giovanni di Borromeo, and this was to last until the late 1470s. After Galeazzo’s death in 1438, both companies in northern Europe were re-formed in the name of his nephew 4 Peter Partner, The Papal State under Martin V: The Administration and Government of the Temporal Power in the Early Fifteenth Century (London: The British School at Rome, 1958), 67 (n. 4), 70 (n. 2), 177 (n. 4). 5 Scattered information drawn from Venetian Archives can be found in Reinhold C. Mueller, The Venetian Money Market: Banks, Panics, and the Public Debt, 1200-1500 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 272-3, 560-1.
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Alessandro, with Antonio di Francesco still as a partner. Galeazzo had also established a company at the Papal Court in partnership with Tommaso Spinelli who in 1435 was in Basel, where the Great Council of the Church had just opened. On Galeazzo’s death the company passed to his nephew, Borromeo di Antonio. Profits of 7,937 cameral florins were made between 1437 and 1441, but compared to those to those enjoyed by the Medici they were relatively small. On the death of Alessandro di Filippo in 1431, two new partnerships were created in Venice, both with Lazzaro di Giovanni, one in the name of Alessandro’s nephew, Antonio di Borromeo, the other with Antonio’s son, Borromeo. Gabriello Borromei was still working in Florence in 1438, whereas other members of this branch of the family were active elsewhere, notably Gabriello’s cousins Giuliano and Alessandro di Piero who in 1433 were employees of Tommaso Spinelli in Venice. However, in the 1430s the most significant developments were in Milan. Vitaliano Borromei and his Milanese partners had undertaken their foreign operations before then through the companies of the Venetian branch of the family; but around 1434, they decided to expand. Vitaliano was no longer Treasurer of the Duchy, an activity which had undoubtedly brought him wealth and prestige but which also made it difficult to use his resources for other ventures. A single cash loan to the Visconti had cost him almost £20,000 imperial of Milan, for example.6 So the Milanese branch decided to open its own companies in the north of Europe in Bruges and London and then, just a year or two later, in Barcelona. The Borromei Bank Research Project focuses on the activities of the two companies in London and Bruges, from 1436 to 1439 and does so because of the survival in the Borromeo-Arese family archive of two ledgers, one for Bruges for the year 1438 and the other for London for the years 1436 to 1439.7
6
Zerbi, Le origini, 339. The London ledger was studied almost a century ago by Biscaro. His was a pioneering study which, despite its use as reference source by some leading scholars (de Roover, Mueller), has proved to be not always accurate and complete. Our work on the Borromei ledgers is still in progress: the Bruges ledger has been fully analyzed, whereas we are still in the process of inputting material for the London ledger. There are no surviving ledgers for Barcelona: a short account of this company is given below. 7
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Filippo Borromei & Co. of Bruges and London The first company was established at Bruges, under the name of Vitaliano’s teenage son, Filippo, hence its name, Filippo Borromei & Co. It was opened for business on 1 January 1435 and, according to the contract establishing it, was to last for five years. The initial capital was £3,000 flemish which was entirely provided by count Vitaliano Borromei. But the profits were to be divided between Vitaliano (75 per cent), Paolo di Antonio da Castagnolo of Florence and Giovanni di Michele Micheli of Lucca (12.5 per cent each), and it was they who had to go to Bruges.8 Towards the end of 1435 Giovanni Bindotti moved from Milan to London, and began organizing the imminent opening of a branch there. During the first months of his stay he seems to have kept all the accounts in a small ledger, his quadernetto, until 8 March 1436 when Giovanni Micheli moved to London from Bruges and took over the management of the company. It was clearly a branch of the company at Bruges and again in the name of Filippo Borromei: both ledgers record the transfer of £1,600 flemish (or 16,000 flemish écus), equivalent to £1,431.17.1 sterling at an exchange rate of sterlings 21 5/12 per écu, from Bruges to London. As the money came from Bruges, the initial capital of £3,000 flemish must have been used to establish both banks, and cannot be taken as the capital for Bruges only. From the ledgers it is also clear that at the end of each year all the profits from the London branch had to be transferred to Bruges, where they were then credited to the Profit and Loss account of the main bank.9 Around 1436-1437 a third 8 For the contract, written on July 1434, see ABIB, Box file 1051 (b) and Box file 661 (a). A substantial contribution to the capital of the company was also given by the heirs of Giovanni Del Barza of Milan. On 1 January 1438 they had a credit from the previous year of £915.19.7 flemish. On 31 December they were credited with the interest on that sum (the dischrezione). They were holding what is known as a deposito a discrezione, but this time the total sum was not carried forward to the libro azzurro 1439, but to the libro segreto which, unfortunately, has not survived. 9 “I quali denari abiamo chonsignati al detto Giovanni Micheli che in Londra li debi trafighare a nome di Filippo Boromei e compagni. E di tutto il guadagno si farà di netto de la detta compagnia in chapo de l’anno, il detto Giovanni ne de’ fare creditore la compagnia di Brugia e Paulo da Castagnolo ghovernatore di detta compagnia di Bruggia de’ ridure tutti li avanzi di Brugia insieme con queli di Londra e quie partire il guadagno secondo sono d’achordo per la charta à domino Vitaliano Boromei del detto Giovanni e del detto Paulo da Castagnolo” (ABIB, BBr fol. 153.1, BLo fol. 47.7). For Bindotti’s arrival in London, BLo fol. 17.1dare (payment for the rent of the house for one year until 29 September 1436); for his
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bank called Filippo Borromei & Co. was founded at Barcelona, but as there no surviving ledgers it is not known whether it had complete autonomy from the Bruges-London banks or from the main company at Milan.10 The same strategy of founding a main company in Bruges with a branch in London was also adopted by other Italian families: for example the Bardi, the Salviati and the Medici. Before opening their bank in London in 1446, with a capital of £2,500 sterling, the Medici had been operating through an office in London financed and staffed by the Bruges branch.11 In what follows we will try to demonstrate why this was probably a common strategy, in the wider context of a discussion of the evidence from the Borromei ledgers on the balance of trade between northern and southern Europe. In Chapter VI “Banking and the Money Market” of his book on the Medici Bank, de Roover focuses on the difficulties in making settlements between the north and the south of Europe, because the balance of trade was consistently unfavorable to Flanders. Then, in Chapter XIII, “Bruges and London,” he quite rightly says that “in the fifteenth century London was [...] only a satellite that moved in the orbit of Bruges,” as far as banking was concerned, but that the Low Countries depended on England to settle their unfavorable balance of trade with all the Italian city states, because English wool was the only commodity which the Italian were eager to buy and which could be used to restore the balance. [...] The economies of the Low Countries and England were thus linked by a common interest in the wool trade and were interrelated in still other respects, because Bruges needed credits in England in order to buy wool with which to pay Italian claims. The task of adjusting international balances fell upon the Italian banking houses, and it is no wonder that there were active relations between the bourse in Bruges and Lombard Street in London.12
quadernetto, BLo fol. 5.1. 10 See Mainoni, Mercanti, 90-3 on the first years of activity of the Borromei in Barcelona. An isolated reference to a Borromei company in Barcelona at the end of the XIV century is given in Jacks and Caferro, The Spinelli, 47, but no source is provided. 11 Raymond de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici bank, 1397-1494 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 62-3, 321. 12 de Roover, The Rise and Decline, 317.
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De Roover concentrated his attention on the wool trade, in which the Borromei also participated. Between 1436 and 1439 they bought 379 sacks of English wool for export for themselves and in partnership with a third party or parties, at a cost of £4,514.6.3 sterling, from a variety of suppliers in Burford (Oxfordshire) and from a Mr. Thomas of the March of Wales. Probably as a favor, the Borromei bought him an expensive bed and feather mattress in Bruges and had it shipped over to the Marches. They also purchased wool from London and Southampton merchants. Much of it was consigned directly to Southampton, to be loaded on the galleys by the Borromei agent there, Cristofano Cattano, but some was sent to Middleburg for forwarding by sea to Italy. The Borromei Bruges also bought wool directly from the Staple at Calais, but lesser grades from Lindsey (Lincs.), Nottingham, and elsewhere in the Midlands and Eastern England, not for export overland to Italy but for sale to local clothiers in Flanders and Brabant. The two branches of the trade were kept separate, however, with the fine wool going to Italy, to be sold on to lanaiuoli of Milan and Florence, as is clear from the ledger of the Borromei bank in Milan for 1445-1446. As usual, the wool was bought on credit, one third down and the other two thirds at specified dates, so that total payment could be spread over two or three years.13 By the time the wool reached the galleys or other ships and customs duties, inland transport costs and other expenses had been paid, then the total cost of the wool had risen to £6,377.5.8 sterling, from the initial £4,514.6.3 sterling. It is very unlikely that the Borromei could have covered these costs from the sale of their imports, as the Hosting Statute of 1439-40 required.14 Between 1436 and 1439 they sold fustian and cotton to the Londoners for about £2,000 sterling and silk cloth, velvets, satins, damask, and baldechins to the value of £1,859.12.1 sterling. These were their two main imports: the remainder followed the usual pattern of trade to London, some raw materials (madder), spices,
13 For exports of English wool by sea from Middleburg and Arnemuiden see: ABIB, BBr fols. 353.3, 356.2, 358.3, 378.1, 378.3, 381.2, 382.1. For purchases of wool in England and export via Southampton see: ABIB, BLo fols. 68.1 (1436), 101.1 (1437). For purchases at the Staples and subsequent sales in Antwerp and Malines see: BBr fols. 238.1, 248.1, 377.2, 379.1, 383.2, 386.1. For the export to Florence and to Milan see: ABIB, Mastri n. 9-10, passim. 14 18 Henry VI c. 4.
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needles from Milan, other cheap cloth from Holland and some mercery ware, but they did not amount to that much. Moreover, to the value of the wool exports has to be added that of cloth exports which, as E. B. Fryde has already argued, de Roover almost entirely ignored in his analysis of the balance of payments.15 Between 1436 and 1439 the Borromei bought for export English cloth worth £1,415.6.10 sterling, which with expenses came to £1,847.15.9 sterling.16 Purchases of wool and cloth combined far outweighed the money received from the sale of imports in London, and that is true of the Italian trade with England generally for much of the fifteenth century, up to perhaps the 1460s. What the surviving royal customs accounts for 1422-1461 show is that it was the Florentine and Milanese merchants who were interested primarily in wool although, as has been seen, they also bought cloth, to about a third or more of the value of wool. A complete record exists for the loading of the Venetian galleys in London in the autumn of 1438. In all, Italian merchants exported some 8,462 broadcloths or their equivalents in cheaper cloths, worth some £14,809 sterling by customs valuations, with the Venetians themselves being the main exporters with no less than 7,479 cloths. By contrast, in the same year, Michaelmas to Michaelmas (29 September 1438 to 29 September 1439), all Italian imports through London were valued at about £10,075 sterling, for customs’ purposes. These import and export figures are taken from the Petty Custom accounts and so do not include those for wool exports. In 1438-1439 the Italians exported a total of 342 sacks from London, worth perhaps in all another £5,000 sterling, based on Borromei ledger valuations. These are the figures for London only. The Italians exported a further 4,307 cloths and 631 sacks of 15 Edmund B. Fryde, “Anglo-Italian Commerce in the Fifteenth Century: Some Evidence about Profits and the Balance of Trade,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 50 (1972): 350-3. 16 Biscaro, “Il banco Filippo Borromei,” 92-5. Most of this was not the traditional English broadcloth, fulled, dyed and finished, and in bolts 24 yards long by 1-1 1/2 yards wide between the lists (the classic definition of a broadcloth), but lighter, half width, cheaper streits, narrow cloths from Essex and Suffolk and from the west country which were probably intended for a mass market in Italy and the Mediterranean world. It is clear both from the London ledger and from the royal customs accounts that many of the Italian exporters were doing the same, buying cheaper, lighter cloths which were then equated to the unit of a broadcloth, with two pieces of streits equaling one broadcloth, for the purposes of collecting the royal customs duties.
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wool worth together about £20,000 through Southampton in 1438-1439 against imports valued at £14,540 sterling.17 Arriving at a figure for the Italian balance of trade in this year is difficult, involving as it does valuations from different sources, along with some estimates, but it was possibly about £15,000 sterling in England’s favor. The Borromei ledgers and the royal customs accounts are at one here, and they show that the much-maligned Italians were a source of considerable profit to the English crown and to English wool suppliers and cloth producers. How were these debits in London to be met? One way was through the transfer of papal revenues from England to Rome, a task traditionally carried out by Italian merchant-bankers. The Borromei ledgers show no operations of this type. Nor could they be covered by profits from the sale of imports in Bruges. The ledger for 1438 shows that their trade in that city was minimal. Most of the imported silk cloth went on to London, as did much of the madder and fustians bought mainly at Middleburg and Antwerp.18 Bruges may have been the international money market for the north, but London and its outports Southampton and Sandwich were the centers for both imports and exports. De Roover argued that the only way the apparently permanent imbalance in trade could be settled was by the eventual shipment of bullion from north to south. But was this really the case? The Borromei ledgers contain no records of the transfer of coin to Italy from Flanders or from England, where the export of bullion in any form was strictly forbidden. Écus were sent from Geneva to Milan, presumably to settle balances between these centers, but that was all.19 There is no reason to suppose that the Borromei would have disguised such transfers. They recorded all other payments and expenses in meticulous detail, especially transport costs, and the only secrecy was in reporting profits to the libro segreto. 17
James L. Bolton, “Alien Merchants in England in the Reign of Henry VI, 1422-61,” unpublished Oxford B.Litt. thesis (1971), 140-1; Appendix 1, Tables 3, 8; National Archives, London, E 122/73/10, 11, 12, E 122/141/23; Eleanora M. Carus Wilson and Olive Coleman, England’s Export Trade 1275-1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 60, 95. 18 On the trade of Bruges and Antwerp in the 1430s see our article “When Did Antwerp Replace Bruges as the Commercial and Financial Centre of North-Western Europe? The Evidence of the Borromei Ledger for 1438,” forthcoming in The Economic History Review. 19 ABIB, BBr fols. 305.1dare, 331.1avere.
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Bruges, London and the Mediterranean World Bullion transfers were not at all necessary. What the Bruges and London ledgers also show is that this imbalance was met by moving money as distinct from coin or bullion across Europe by means of letters of advice (lettere d’avixo) or bills of exchange.20 Thanks to the use of technology, we are now able to make some quantitative evaluations. The letter of advice was a financial instrument whereby a merchant-banker asked his foreign correspondent to make someone creditor and someone else debtor at a certain date and at a specific exchange rate. The writers were often one of the parties involved, but that was not always the case. It was a way of transferring credits and debits across Europe without actually transferring bullion and there are, in the Bruges ledger for 1438, 204 letters of advice, for a total value of £22,754.15.8 flemish. A more widely used and better known financial instrument, however, was the bill of exchange.21 The Bruges ledger records 1,233 bills of exchange in 1438 where either the Borromei acted in one of the four main roles, deliverer, taker, payor or payee, or where a third party acted for them, to a combined value of £95,563 flemish and at an average of £77.10.0 flemish per bill. The dominating role of Venice is perhaps not surprising, and fits well with the recent account given by Mueller in his book on The Venetian Money Market.22 Bills to and from Venice, 387 in all, were 31.39 per cent of the total by number but 41.57 per cent by value, at £39,732 flemish. The average value of a bill sent to or from Venice was therefore almost £103 flemish. London came next in the ranking of bills sent and received, 239 to a total value of £16,634 flemish, respectively 19.38 20
Money is taken to mean here book money, ledger credits and debits or paper money. Coin and bullion were used indiscriminately by contemporaries but the first refers to gold and silver coins, the second to ingots of precious metal. 21 No detailed account of the origins and workings of the bill of exchange is given here, because it is a subject on which much has been written. Good introductions will be found in Raymond de Roover’s Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Julius Kirshner (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1974) and the bibliography quoted there; and in Giulio Mandich’s “Per una ricostruzione delle operazioni mercantili e bancarie della compagnia dei Covoni,” in Armando Sapori, ed., Libro giallo della compagnia dei Covoni (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Cisalpino, 1970), CLXXVIII-CXCIII. 22 On the Rialto market and its patterns see Mueller, The Venetian Money Market, in particular 303-37.
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per cent of the total number of bills and 17.4 per cent of their value, with the average bill worth almost £70 flemish. Barcelona was only just behind in number with 238 bills, 19.30 per cent of the total, but their value, at £18,261 flemish and 19.11 per cent of the whole, was higher and the average bill worth almost £77 flemish. By contrast, only a few of the transactions involved Geneva, which is slightly surprising, given the importance of the four fairs which every year were held in the Swiss town. One of the functions of the bill of exchange was that of extending credit locally. This could be done in a variety of slightly different ways, but usually involved a re-exchange operation, with or without actual bills being written and sent. A bill, for example, would be sent from Bruges to Venice and then, when it matured or became payable, another would be sent back from Venice to Bruges. The same parties were involved in both bills and in practice this was a loan extended by the deliverer in Bruges to the taker in Bruges, for a four-month period, since the usance between Bruges and Venice is two months each way. The profitability of delivering or drawing bills of exchange obviously depended on the exchange rate. Merchants-bankers were aware of the daily fluctuations in exchange rates, and tried to make the most of the information they received from their correspondents. The wider the difference between the two exchange rates Venice-Bruges and Bruges-Venice, the more profitable it was to lend money and accept repayment by way of re-exchange, and the more costly it was to borrow. Mueller has shown that the first half of July saw exchange rates peak in Venice, when merchants were scrambling for credit with which to pay their obligations as well as for the merchandise and bullion they wished to load onto the departing galleys [to the Levant] as exchange commodities [...] another maturity date that was commonly fixed was the Christmas fair, which it was hoped would coincide with the return of the galleys.23
What really mattered, however, was not knowing the exchange rates between Bruges and Venice on the day but predicting what they
23
Mueller, The Venetian Money Market, 306.
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BORROMEI BANK RESEARCH PROJECT
475
In the great majority of cases the Borromei were remitting to or drawing on various banking centers across western Europe in order to make their profits on the movement of funds. They could conduct these operations from Bruges itself, or by way of arbitrage, that is, by ordering one of their correspondents to draw or remit bills of exchange from another place. So, for example, on 15 December the Borromei Bruges credited the account of Cecco di Tommaso and brothers of Venice upon receipt of a bill of exchange for 500 ducats at gr. 49 1/4 per ducat (= £102.12.1 flemish). On 24 December, they wrote to London, to their branch there, instructing them to credit the account of Cecco di Tommaso for 1,023 flemish écus at st. 21 1/3 per écu (= £102.6.1 flemish). For this “service” they received three écus or six flemish shillings in commission. On 9 January 1438 Ventura & Co. of Barcelona drew 400 venetian ducats for the Borromei Bruges on Arrighino Panigarola of Venice. In the same month, and in February, he was drawing other bills on London for the Borromei Bruges. In other words, it was quite common for a correspondent to draw or remit bills for the Borromei Bruges between banking centers outside Flanders, between Venice and Barcelona, for example, or Geneva and Venice, at the same time as the Borromei Bruges was delivering money to him from Bruges.25 A more detailed examination of their exchange operations with Venice shows that during 1438 the Borromei Bruges were takers of bills of exchange drawn on Venice to a value of almost £13,500 flemish, whereas they were deliverers for less than £6,300 flemish, as shown in Graph 3. A comparison with Graph 1 shows that the Borromei in Bruges were well aware of the costs of borrowing in August and September and took up most of their loans in June, July and October. In all, they borrowed about £6,130 flemish by way of exchange with Venice in June-October 1438, but only delivered, or lent, about £1,430 flemish in the same period. The value of exchange between Bruges and Barcelona was £15,945 flemish and the Borromei bank acted as payors, in Bruges, for as much as £7,367 flemish or 46.2 per cent of this sum. In general, Italian merchant-bankers in Barcelona were creditors in Bruges and debtors in Venice, whereas the substantial Catalan co25
ABIB, BBr fols. 217.1dare-avere, 285.1dare.
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BORROMEI BANK RESEARCH PROJECT
477
The advantages of dealing directly with a sister company based in another major commercial city are obvious. Information could be exchanged easily, merchandise could be consigned to them for sale locally, and money transferred by simple book entries. But the relationship between the Borromei banks in Bruges and London was exceptionally close. They functioned almost as one unit, with the main purpose of exchange operations through Bruges being to realize the funds the London branch needed to buy English wool and cloth for export. As Munro and others have shown, in the trade between the Low Countries and England, both the Staplers (those exporting wool to Calais) and the Merchant Adventurers (who exported woollen cloth to the Low Countries) needed to remit money back to England, once their products were sold. The Mercers, who bought luxury cloths and other goods in the Low Countries and exported them to England, needed funds there in order to buy their imports. Bills of exchange met all these needs. Munro shows how the Staplers and Merchant Adventurers were lending to the Mercers (who were takers of bills), in the Low Countries, with the Mercers then repaying the loan in England, from the proceeds of their sales. For their part, Staplers and Merchant Adventurers could have their money transferred directly back to England by bill or letter of advice, or the Staplers could finance their own trade in England, by being takers of bills of exchange sold to the Mercers. The Mercers would then have their money back in the Low Countries, where they needed it to make their purchases.27 The distinction between Mercers, Staplers and Merchant Adventurers is perhaps drawn too sharply here. One man could often be all three, but the Borromei ledgers show clearly how the arrangement worked in practice. London merchants, often acting through their factors or attorneys in the Low Countries, were takers and payors of bills of exchange where the Borromei banks of Bruges and London were respectively deliverers and payees. This occurs in 60 of the 96 bills delivered by the Borromei Bruges to the Borromei London but in none of the 47 bills delivered by the Borromei London to the Borromei Bruges. The Borromei Bruges did not draw on the Borromei London bills payable to London 27 John H. A. Munro, “Bullionism and the Bill of Exchange in England, 1272-1663: A Study in Monetary Management and Popular Prejudice,” in Fredi Chiappelli, ed., The Dawn of Modern Banking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 194-196.
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481
whole year, apart from two short spell between 30 August and 22 September and 6 and 28 November, and to the extent of more than £1,800 flemish on both 25 January and 8 May. But to messer Antonio and Lazzaro di Giovanni they were in debit for the entire year. By drawing on Venice so extensively the Borromei in Bruges were in fact drawing on the whole Italian money market, for the Republic was at its center.
Epilogue The work of de Roover has to be a starting point for any analysis of Italian banking activities in northern Europe. His sources were different from ours, as he mainly based his research upon letters and made only limited reference to account books. This was an advantage in one sense, because it is much easier to determine the reasoning behind decisions and longer-term strategies from commercial correspondence than from a company’s libro mastro. On the other hand, ledgers provide the details of the practical operations which are simply not obtainable from other sources and, thanks to computer technology, we are now able to make quantitative evaluations from them and analyze thoroughly the sources available to us. In terms of payments, Bruges was highly indebted to both Barcelona and above all to Venice, but only because it was transferring large credits to London to pay for exports of wool and cloth. The ledgers also demonstrate that, for the Borromei, Bruges and London must be treated as a single company in the years 14361439 and not as separate entities. But there are many questions that still need answers. The first must be, was the enterprise in north-western Europe profitable? What follow are the figures taken from the Borromei’s own records of profits and losses, taking London first.28 1436 1437
profit profit
1438 1439
profit profit
28
£st 24.17.8 = c. £fl 28 £st 318.13.7 = c. £fl 364 (£fl 392.12.6 for 1436-37) £st 210. 0.0 = c. £fl 240 £st 386.12.1 = c. £fl 442
ABIB, BLo fols. 17, 89, 146, 177, 185, 257, 299, 305, 406.
482
GUIDI BRUSCOLI AND BOLTON
The main sources of profit were exchange operations and trade, but the Borromei of London also enjoyed a steady income from brokerage and commission on trade undertaken on behalf of others. In striking contrast, the Bruges company enjoyed two years of good profits, but then incurred heavy losses.29 1435 1436 1437 1438
profit profit loss loss
£fl 298.4.2 c. £fl 606 c. £fl 714 £fl 799.12.1
However, it is more meaningful to consider the profits and losses of the two banks together, since it has been argued that they were part a single unit. This shows the following: 1435 1436 1437 1438
profit profit loss loss
c. c. c. c.
£fl £fl £fl £fl
298.4.2 634 350 560
Despite making healthy profits in London, the Borromei were not doing well in northern Europe overall. The reason for this is clear: the heavy losses suffered by Bruges on exchange dealings which more than doubled between 1437 and 1438 from £322.7.2 flemish to £685.2.2 flemish, as shown below in Table 1. Given that most of the exchange was with Venice, it is not surprising that most of the losses were incurred in that area. They were also worse than they first appear. Exchange with Venice amounted to 41.6 per cent of the total but the losses incurred in those operations amounted to 61.5 per cent by value. Operations with London also show losses where the percentage of the total value is greater than the percentage of bills, whereas for Barcelona the reverse is true. No losses were recorded on exchange operations with other places. It is possible that external factors were partially responsible for these losses. From 1429 onwards Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, faced severe monetary and political problems in his northern territories as well as with their main trading partner, England. The imposition of the bullion ordinances at the Calais Staple 29
ABIB, BBr fols. 39, 162.1avere, 162.2avere, 254.
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484
GUIDI BRUSCOLI AND BOLTON
common currency throughout his northern territories and Philip had to agree to maintain monetary stability for the next 20 years. The value of the coinage was severely deflated, with new gold and silver coins 6.1 and 7.0 per cent stronger than those of 1428. To attract money to his mints the duke imposed strict bans on the export of bullion from his lands and cut his seignorage to a minimum. Eventually, and probably by 1437, the re-coinage proved a success but there are signs in the Borromei ledger of continuing uncertainties, with references to “old,” “bad” and “good” money.30 Yet, if the Borromei’s profits were severely affected by these circumstances, then so should those of other companies, and they were not. Bernardo Portinari was sent to Bruges by the Medici in 1436 to settle outstanding debits and “to inquire about local customs with respect to trade as well as to bills of exchange, and to find out the strength and the credit standing of the principal foreign merchants residing in Bruges, especially the exchange dealers.” He must have made a favorable report, because he returned to Bruges to act as an agent for the Medici and then became an active partner in the bank they founded there in 1439. It was soon making good profits: £670.1.5 flemish in 1439-1440, £498.16.4 flemish in 1441, £302.0.0 flemish in 1442 and £538.7.6 flemish in 1443.31 Political upheaval, famines and monetary revaluation did not mean heavy losses for the Medici and other reasons must be sought to explain the Borromei’s failures, if failures they were. Bad management may explain the losses in 1437 and it is quite possible that in 1438 a desperate and unsuccessful attempt was being made to recoup them by gambling on the exchange market. The evidence from the ledger, however, suggests that there was sound commercial reasoning behind the heavy losses on exchange 30 Wim P. Blockmans, “The Formation of a Political Union,” in J. C. H. Blom and Emiel Lamberts, eds., A History of the Low Countries (New York and London: Berghahn, 1999), 95; David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (London and New York: Lamberts, 1992), 359-61; John H. A. Munro, Wool, Cloth, and Gold. The Struggle for Bullion in the Anglo-Burgundian Trade, 1340-1478 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), Chapter IV, passim. ABIB, BBr fols. 48.1avere, 49.4dare, 54.5avere, 82.5avere, 249.5dare. 31 de Roover, The Rise and Decline, 59-60, 320, 322 (Table 67). Presumably, as London was in these years only a “suboffice” (as de Roover defines it) of Bruges, these are the aggregated figures for the profits enjoyed jointly in Bruges and London. For Portinari’s account with the Borromei in Bruges, ABIB, BBr fols. 32.2, 82.5, 133.3, 133.4.
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sustained in that year. The Borromei were willing to borrow heavily from their correspondents to finance trade through London, where profits in 1439 were 84 per cent up on the previous year. As none of the other Bruges ledgers has survived, it is not possible to determine whether the bank there returned to profit, but it seems unlikely. The argument already advanced that the Borromei of Milan took a wide, European view of the banking and trading operations can also be taken a little further, if somewhat speculatively. The three companies outside Italy, in Bruges, London and Barcelona, all belonged to Count Vitaliano of Milan. He had provided their initial capital and it was he who took the major share of such profits as there were. Further investigation of both the London ledger and those for their main bank may be able to determine whether or not the Borromei of Milan did coordinate their operations so that any losses in the north were more than covered by profits from the sale of English imports in the south.32 In this context, it must also be remembered that losses on foreign exchange in Bruges in 1438 meant profits for London and Barcelona. There is also a further and probably unanswerable question, what exactly was the relationship between the Borromei of Milan and the Borromei of Venice? In exchange to Venice in 1438, 75 per cent of the losses were incurred on dealings with one company only, messer Antonio Borromei and Lazzaro di Giovanni. During the 1420s the Borromei of Milan had used the two banks founded in Bruges and London by the Borromei of Venice as their correspondents. Both these banks continued their operations after Count Vitaliano established his own banks in the north and Alessandro Borromei and Antonio di Francesco & Co. of Bruges and Antwerp were one of the best clients of Filippo Borromei & Co. of Bruges, and usually referred to in the ledger as “i Borromei.” Were messer Antonio and Lazzaro di Giovanni in competition with or were they prepared to lend heavily to their Milanese cousins not only because they made a profit on the business but also because they were the fifth element in a successful “family” enterprise that ran from Milan through Venice to Barcelona, Bruges and London? This may be wishful thinking, but the heavy losses in Bruges can perhaps be 32 This is Fryde’s argument, albeit from limited evidence, in his “Anglo-Italian Commerce,” 353-355.
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better explained in terms of a co-ordinated and ultimately profitable banking and trading enterprise between five major European centers rather than in the simpler context of Bruges, London and Milan. Whatever the explanation, the managers of the bank at Bruges knew that 1438 was a difficult year. The substantial losses in the Profit and Loss account, £881.19.3 flemish in all, were not carried forward to the libro azzurro for 1439, as was the custom, but to the libro bianco for 1440, together with the profits from London for the years 1436 to 1438 which amounted to £632.12.6.33 Why this was done is a mystery and is likely to remain so, as both the libro azzurro and the libro bianco have been destroyed. The contract for the Bruges bank was due to end on 31 December 1439 and the manager, Paolo da Castagnolo, may have been planning a final year’s trading without the added burden of huge debits from 1437 and 1438. That is one explanation but another less charitable view is that he was trying to hide the truth from Count Vitaliano in the hope that 1439 would be a better year, with profits at last wiping out losses. In any case, the Bruges bank ceased trading at some time in 1440 and the London bank closed with it. Biscaro argued that it was the losses on exchange to Venice that caused the closure, but maybe it was simply not renewed after the end of the first contract; a completely new contract with different partners was then drawn up at Bruges, London and Barcelona.34 The staff of the London branch, Giovanni and Niccolò Micheli, Felice da Fagnano and Alessandro da Palastrello appear in the English Views of Hosts trading in the city in the early 1440s and the ledger of Antonio Della Casa & Co. at the Papal court contains accounts for Filippo Borromei & Co. of Bruges, London and Barcelona in 1441 and 1442. This suggests that they may have still been working for the Borromei, on an informal basis. Biscaro states that at the beginning of 1441 Felice da Fagnano, Count Vitaliano’s brother-in- law was the representative of the company in London, with Vitaliano’s illegitimate son Giovanni alias Prevosto Borromei as the representative of the company in Bruges.35 Vitaliano may himself have been 33
ABIB, BBr fols. 254.1, 270.1. Biscaro, “Il banco Filippo Borromei,” 313. 35 Views of Hosts, National Archives, London, E 101/128/30, 31. Archivio dell’Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence, 488, fols. 80, 116, 195 (Bruges); fols. 150, 215, 221, 223, 236, 314, 374 (London); fols. 168, 171, 172, 185, 221, 246, 247, 34
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in financial difficulties in Italy in these years, since he had to sell large parts of his estates in 1444.36 However, he still thought it worthwhile to re-found and re-structure the banks in Bruges, London and Barcelona. By contracts dated 12 March 1443 Vitaliano established two new and separate companies, one in Bruges and the other in London, to be open for business on the 1 January 1444.37 The company at Bruges, Prevosto e Alessandro Borromei & Co., had a capital of £19,200 milanese. This contract was again for five years (14441448), but was probably renewed, in the name of Prevosto only, as the company lasted until 1457. Count Vitaliano again provided the capital and was entitled to 66.6 per cent of the profits, whilst the remaining third was to be divided between Prevosto and Alessandro di Piero Borromei, who were sent to Bruges where Alessandro had already worked for the previous company.38 The London company had a very similar capital: £19,076.16.4 milanese. Apart from the initial contracts there is very little surviving information for either of the companies, but they do seem to have worked separately, possibly to avoid the situation that had occurred in 1440 when the closure of Bruges led to the simultaneous closure of London. The bank was known as Felice da Fagnano & Co. Felice, whose sister had married Vitaliano and who had been previously involved in the management of the Bruges company, was the manager. Profits had to be divided between Vitaliano, who was to have two thirds, and Felice and Alessandro da Palastrello of Piacenza one third between them. Palastrello had also worked for the previous company in London. All that can so far be said about new company is that in 1448 Vitaliano was thinking of closing it due to bad management but that it was not dissolved until 14 March 1452.39
252 (Barcelona). Biscaro, “Il banco Filippo Borromei,” 312-3. Why Giovanni was known as “il prevosto,” the parish priest, is not known. 36 Mainoni, Mercanti, 94. 37 As we have seen, the same strategy seems to have been adopted by the Medici who in 1439 opened the Bruges company and a “suboffice” in London, but in 1446 thought it worthwhile to have two separate companies (see above, note 11). 38 ABIB, Box file 1051 (c) for the contract, and Box file 661 (unnumbered) for the dissolution. 39 ABIB, Box file 1051(a, e) for the contract, and Box file 661(a) for the dissolution.
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There was a similar restructuring at Barcelona and on 1 January 1445 a new company was established there with a capital of 6,000 milanese florins provided by Vitaliano, who was to have two thirds of the profits, with Arrighino di Ambrogio Pozzobonello taking the other third. They each had a representative in Barcelona, respectively Taddeo di Ardizio Vismara and Francesco di Arrighino Pozzobonello. Initially the company was an accomandita in the name of the two factors but well before the end of the contract, on 20 June 1446, the agreement was reshaped. Vitaliano’s son, Filippo, was now to play a much more important role in the management of the bank. There had been disputes and litigation between the original partners, and Vitaliano had become increasingly distrustful of Vismara.40 The person who seems to have taken the blame for the inadequate performance of the Bruges bank between 1435 and 1440 was its manager, Paolo da Castagnolo. Other members of staff survived and were promoted but by 1445-1446 he was no longer a shareholder in the main company at Milan nor was he employed by the Borromei in any other capacity.41 Winding up the affairs of Filippo Borromei & Co. of Bruges and of London was presumably a complex business and the ledgers would have been scrutinized with great care. That, as Biscaro noted, is probably why they have survived and why we are able to discuss them here, 500 years later.
40 ABIB, Box file 1051 (a-d). For the Borromei companies of Barcelona see also Mainoni, Mercanti, in particular 90-110. 41 Apparently in these years he started managing the ducal treasury, but went bankrupt in 1447 (Mainoni, Mercanti, 93).
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SHOPS AND SHOPPING IN THE EARLY THIRTEENTH CENTURY: THREE TEXTS1 Martha Carlin
Markets, shops and shopping have always been hallmarks of urban life. Historians who have attempted to investigate the urban context of medieval commerce have traditionally relied for sources on the archival records, such as trading regulations, tax lists, and financial and legal records, produced by towns, institutions, and wealthy households. However, records of this kind are often scarce for the early thirteenth century. One type of source that has not received much attention by historians of urban commerce in the thirteenth century are didactic texts, such as the language manuals used for teaching Latin, and the dictaminal texts that provided models of legal forms and standard letters.2 In this paper I will focus on three such texts, all of which were published in the nineteenth century, but none of which has drawn the attention of historians of urban trade. All three texts were written in the early thirteenth century by English authors. The first is a Latin manual written by John of Garland. He was born about 1195, studied at Oxford around 12101213, and then went to Paris, where he became a teacher of grammar.3 About 1218 he wrote a Latin manual for the use of his stu1
I am very grateful to acknowledge the generous support of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for granting me a sabbatical in 2003-4, and of the American Philosophical Society for a Sabbatical Fellowship in that year, which enabled me to undertake much of the research and writing for this paper. 2 Alexander Nequam’s (or Neckam’s) De nominibus utensilium has, however, been examined by John Munro for its description of weaving on a horizontal loom. See Munro, “Textiles,” in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. Frank A. Mantello and George Rigg (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 474-84. 3 Aside from three years of teaching at the newly-founded University of Toulouse (1229-31) and a brief period in England, perhaps teaching the children of noble families (probably between 1232 and 1241), Garland seems to have lived in Paris until his death sometime after 1258, perhaps after 1272. On John of Garland’s life and works, see Louis John Paetow, ed., Morale scolarium of John of Garland (Johannes de Garlandia), in Memoirs of the University of
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dents and called it Dictionarius. Garland’s work was the first to use that word, but it was not a dictionary in the modern sense. Rather, it was a rambling discourse on daily life, into which Garland crammed as much Latin vocabulary as possible. Garland revised his Dictionarius around 1230, and it survives in numerous manuscripts.4 There is a recent scholarly edition of it, but until now the only translation of this very valuable work has been a useful but imperfect one that was privately printed and is not generally accessible.5 The second text is a brief, untitled, and anonymous dictaminal treatise (a treatise on the art of writing letters), which forms part of a manuscript in the British Library, Additional MS 8167, fols. 88r-90v. It was transcribed and printed in 1879 by Georg Waitz, a German scholar, who dated it to the fourteenth century.6 In fact, however, the entire volume was written in the first half of the thirteenth century, and was acquired by a monk of Westminster Abbey around 1250. Our treatise forms part of a section of this volume (Article 5, fols. 88r-133r) that contains a large, untitled, and anonymous dictaminal and legal collection that seems to have been compiled at Oxford between 1220 and 1240.7 According to H. G. California, vol. 4, no. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, and London: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 77-153, especially 82-96 and 127-31; and Traugott Lawler, “Garland, John of (b. c. 1195, d. in or after 1258),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), available online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10385 [seen 30 Jan. 2005]. 4 For a list of more than twenty manuscripts, see Morale scolarium, ed. Paetow, 129. Garland’s revision of the Dictionarius around 1230 is noted by Lawler, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.n. “Garland, John of.” 5 For a discussion of the editions of the Dictionarius by Hercule Géraud (1837), Baron [Joseph] Kervyn de Lettenhove (1850), Thomas Wright (1857), and August Scheler (1865), see Tony Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth Century England, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1: 191-2 and n.1. For Hunt’s own edition of the Dictionarius and its vernacular glosses, see Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, 1: 191-203 (text), and 2: 125-56 (glosses). The sole translation of the Dictionarius is Barbara Blatt Rubin, trans., The “Dictionarius” of John of Garlande and the Author’s Commentary (Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1981). Rubin’s translation, which appeared a decade before Tony Hunt’s edition of the text and its vernacular glosses, was based on the edition published by Thomas Wright in A Volume of Vocabularies Illustrating the Condition and Manners of our Forefathers, Vol. 1 of A Library of National Antiquities (Liverpool: Joseph Mayer, 1857). 6 G[eorg] Waitz, “Handschriften in englischen Bibliotheken,” Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für altere Deutsche Geschichtskunde 4 (1879): 339-43. 7 For a discussion of this manuscript and its date, see the introduction to
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Richardson, our text is the earliest known English dictaminal treatise.8 There are some striking similarities between it and Garland’s Dictionarius, and I wonder if Garland or, perhaps, someone connected with him at Oxford was its author. My third text is a set of notes on letter-writing, illustrated by a small collection of model letters. The English antiquary Thomas Hudson Turner published a short and sadly incomplete description of this text in 1847, and included transcripts of three of the form letters that it contained, and a brief reference to a fourth.9 Turner began his description of the text by noting airily that it came “from a manuscript which has recently fallen under my notice.” He provided no other identification of the manuscript whatsoever, other than to state that it dated from the reign of Henry III. Fortunately, I have been able to identify Turner’s mystery manuscript, and it turns out to be the same volume of dictaminal and legal materials that contains our second text (British Library, Additional MS 8167). The letters are on folios 97r-98v, and thus also belong to that section of the manuscript that appears to have been compiled at Oxford between 1220 and 1240. Folios 97-98 contain notes on how to write and respond to orders and requests, illustrated by ten model letters between five fictitious earls and various merchants and others. Six of the letters, including the four described by Turner, consist of exchanges between an earl and his vintner, draper, and skinner concerning the order of goods. The remaining four letters consist of a refusal from one unidentified man to another, and orders from an earl to his officer (probably his household steward), to a member of his affinity, and to his knights.10 The authors of the three texts used discussions of urban occupations, shops, and shopping to instruct students in Latin vocabulary and the art of writing business letters. Together, these texts provide a rich array of information on trades, crafts, shops and shopping in Paris and England in the early thirteenth century. I have provided a translation of Garland’s text, and transcriptions Appendix II, below. 8 H. G. Richardson, “An Oxford Teacher of the Fifteenth Century,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 23 (1939): 447-50. 9 T. H. Turner, “Original Documents,” Archaeological Journal 4 (1847): 142-4. 10 David Crouch and I are preparing an edition and translation of a large selection of the documents in BL, Additional MS 8167, fols. 88r-133r.
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and translations of the two dictaminal texts, in Appendices I-III below. My first text, John of Garland’s Dictionarius, takes us on a walking tour of Paris.11 Garland lived on the Left Bank, in the clos de Garlande (near the present rue Galande), from which he took his name, and much of his text consists of descriptions of the various artisans, retail traders, and goods for sale that were to be seen in his own neighborhood in the newly-developing Latin Quarter, and elsewhere in the city.12 Garland’s text is, however, organized by trade and not by topographical logic, since his aim is to provide his students with topical vocabulary rather than a practical guidebook to Paris. He begins by looking at some of the leather and metal trades. “Today,” he says, “one of my neighbors carried a pole of shoes for sale: laced shoes with pointed toes, buckled shoes, boots and leggings, and the boots worn by women and monks.” Girdlers sell leather belts with iron or copper studs and girdles of woven silk ornamented with silver bars. Saddlers sell both plain and painted saddles, as well as saddle pads, pillions, canvas, curry combs, and stirrups. Shield-makers sell shields covered with cloth, leather, and brass, with painted decorations. John’s neighbor William sells all sorts of small domestic commodities: needles and needle-cases, soap, mirrors, razors, whetstones, and fire-irons. Buckle-makers sell buckles, straps, bits, files, and bridles, while lorimers sell silvered and gilded spurs, and bridles and breast-straps for horses. A peddler hawks knives, sheaths, and styluses. Furbishers sell polished swords, sword-belts, and scabbards. Merchants dwelling on the upscale Grand-Pont (which connected the Île-de-laCité with the Right Bank) sell halters, breech-girdles, straps, and purses made of deerskin, sheepskin, and pigskin. Glovers sell unlined and fur-lined gloves, and leather mittens; hatters make both hats and caps of various materials.
11 It is a rambling narrative in some 84 brief paragraphs, which are arranged topically and are designed to teach the Latin vocabulary for things seen and used in everyday life. The following discussion is based on paragraphs 9-46, 50-54, 66-70, and 72 of the text edited by Tony Hunt in Teaching and Learning Latin, 1: 191-203. 12 For the ordinances of the various craft and trade guilds of Paris c. 1268, see Étienne Boileau, Les Métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris. XIIIe siècle. Le livre des métiers d’Étienne Boileau, ed. René de Lespinasse and François Bonnardot, Histoire générale de Paris (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1879).
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The bowyers, who dwell at the Porte St-Lazare, make bows and crossbows of maple, viburnum, and yew, and arrows and bolts of ash. Brooch-makers sell brooches, pendants, and little bells made of base metals; in churches, the bronze bells of the bell-founders toll the hours. Lowly cobblers repair old shoes, while cordwainers make new ones of tawed leather. They sew the leather into footwear using an awl, linen thread, and pig bristles.13 Skinners sell new pilches (pellicia, pelisses: fur cloaks or coats, with the fur outwards) and fur linings (penulas, furraturas),14 while other men go about the streets of Paris crying that they will repair them.15 Next Garland looks at low-level traders in food and drink, who clearly cater to the student market for which he himself is writing. Cup-menders cry that they will repair cups with bronze and silver wire. They mend mazers and cups made of maple, plane, birch, and aspen. Wine-criers cry wine at various prices and offer samples to taste.16 Street-sellers with baskets of light pastries, wafers, and 13
In Farmer Boy (rev. edn, New York, etc.: Harper and Row, 1953), Chap.23: 292-5), Laura Ingalls Wilder described the same manner of making shoes in New York state in the 1860s: The cobbler, using his right hand, “pulled a length of linen thread across the wad of black cobbler’s wax in his left palm, and he rolled the thread under his right palm, down the front of his leather apron. Then he pulled it and rolled it again... till the thread was shiny-black and stiff with wax. Then he laid a stiff hog-bristle against each end of it, and he waxed and he rolled ... till the bristles were waxed fast to the thread.” The cobbler then clamped the upper pieces of one boot together in a vise and punched a hole through the edges with his awl. “He ran the two bristles through the hole, one from each side, and ... pulled the thread tight. He bored another hole, ran the two bristles through it, and pulled till the waxed thread sank into the leather. That was one stitch.” 14 See Middle English Dictionary (MED), s.v. “Pilch(e);” Elspeth M. Veale, The English Fur Trade in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn, London Record Society, 38 (2003), 219, s.v. “Furrure,” 221, s.vv. “Pane” and “Pellicium.” A penula was a “panel” or “pane” of furs sewn together to make a lining, and a furrura or furratura was the same. According to Elspeth Veale, in England in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries a penula was often larger than a furrura, but in the texts discussed in this paper that distinction does not appear. 15 Cf. Les Crieries de Paris (mid thirteenth-century) by Guillaume de la Villeneuve, which reproduces many of the cries of the street-cries of Paris, including those of the repairers of mantles and pilches (“Il autres crie a grant friçon:/Qui a mantel ne peliçon,/Si le m'aport a rafetier”). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fonds français, no. 837, fol. 246; printed in Alfred Franklin, Dictionnaire des arts, métiers, et professions exercés dans Paris depuis le treizième siècle (Paris, 1906; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 748-51. 16 According to Étienne Boileau, the criers of wine in Paris c. 1268 could go into any tavern that sold wine by retail and demand to be the tavern’s
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rissoles (fried, spiced balls of fruit or minced meat or marrow) cry their wares at night. Regrators, who buy goods for re-sale, send their servants out into the streets to sell cherries, plums, apples, pears, lettuce, cress, and chervil at premium prices. In their windows they display convenience foods: fine white rolls, quiches, butter cakes, soft and hard cheeses, and also candles, which have large sulphured wicks to make them burn better. The bakers bake bread made of various grains and, frequently, of bran. Pastelers (pie-bakers) make a killing selling to clerks pasties filled with pork, chicken, or eel, and tarts and flans—often dirty—stuffed with soft cheeses and eggs. Fast-food cooks roast poultry on hazelwood spits, but they often sell meat that is raw and badly seasoned to the scholars’ servants. The butchers, who hate the scholars, sell them coarse cuts of beef, mutton, and pork, sometimes measled, and lethal andouilles, sausages, black puddings, and tripes.17 The scene now shifts back to the much grander Grand-Pont, where the money-changers count out Parisian money, sterlings, bezants, and other coins on their boards,18 and the goldsmiths sit before their furnaces and tables making hanaps (goblets), brooches, and other ornaments. Hanapers decorate vessels with gold and silver fittings, and put feet and rims on hanaps. Greedy drapers sell a range of false woolen cloths, and also defraud their customers by measuring the cloths incorrectly. Some men usurp the office of women by selling linen goods of all kinds: table linens, towels, sheets, shirts, underclothing, wimples, and kerchiefs. Spicers stock spices, wax, wax candles for churches, and medicinal preparations. crier for that day or the following day, for a fee of 4d. The crier was responsible for seeing the wine drawn and for ensuring that the measures used were correct. He was to cry the wine and its price in the streets twice daily (once daily during Lent, on Sundays and Fridays, and on certain holidays), carrying a pot of the wine and a cup to allow potential customers to taste a sample. Boileau, Métiers, 21-4. A wine-crier is represented in the bottom panel of the early thirteenth-century window of St. Lubinus at Chartres. See Jane Welch Williams, Bread, Wine, and Money: The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Chap. 4, color plate 2, black-and-white plates 86, 96. 17 Cf. Garland’s Commentarius, in Hunt, ed., Teaching and Learning Latin, 1: 221, where Garland notes that sausages, black puddings, haggis, and large pasties were food for sturdy rustics. 18 There are a number of scenes of money-changers in the early thirteenthcentury windows of Chartres Cathedral. See Williams, Bread, Wine, and Money, Chap. 5, color plate 3, and black-and-white plates 117, 120, 127-31.
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The carpenters, who make various things out of wood, include coopers, who make wooden barrels and other vessels, and wheelwrights, who make wheels for carts and wagons. Garland ends his tour with a look at mostly textile crafts. Fullers, naked and panting, full shaggy woolen cloths in troughs of white clay and hot water, then dry them in the sun and pluck up the nap with teasels. Dyers dye woolen cloths with woad and madder, which leave their nails dyed black, blue, and red. Pretty girls turn up their noses at them unless they pay. Tanners work hard tanning horsehides and oxhides in hollowed logs. They scrape the hides with a knife and turn them frequently in their tanbark solution to disperse the raw stench. Smiths forge horseshoes and tools for garden and farm. Cooks scrub pots and pans and dishes in hot water before their ovens and hearths. Women weavers (possibly working at old-fashioned, warp-weighted, vertical looms), draw their bobbins or shuttles through the warp-threads, pulling the weftthread from the spool and spindle. They then beat up the weft, turn the spool on the windlass, and resume weaving.19 Female silk19
See p. 515 and n54 below. The nature of the loom here is unclear. Although the horizontal loom had appeared in Europe in the eleventh century, it is possible that the warp-weighted loom continued in use into the thirteenth century, perhaps especially for domestic weaving by women. Andrew Woodger has argued that the warp-weighted loom also survived in commercial use as the burel (broadcloth) loom until the end of the thirteenth century, when it was decisively superseded by the horizontal broadcloth loom, which had been invented in Flanders in the mid thirteenth century. Andrew Woodger, “The Eclipse of the Burel Weaver: Some Technological Developments in the Thirteenth Century,” Textile History 12 (1981): 59-76. Compare Garland’s description of the women weavers, who are not described either as seated or as using treadles, with the description provided in the late twelfth century by Alexander Nequam (or Neckam) in De nominibus utensilium. In the latter, a seated male weaver works at a horizontal loom with treadles for raising the alternate warp threads; Nequam likens him to a rider with his feet in stirrups. Nequam’s text is edited in Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, 1: 177-89 (the passage on weaving is on pp. 184-5), and the description of weaving is translated and discussed by Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr., in Daily Living in the Twelfth Century, Based on the Observations of Alexander Neckam in London and Paris (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952), 146-50. On the possible continued use of the vertical loom, see also Penelope Walton, “Textiles,” in English Medieval Industries, ed. John Blair and Nigel Ramsay (London and Rio Grande, Ohio: Hambledon Press, 1991), 318-54, especially pp. 327-9. On weaving technologies and terminology, see John H. Munro, “Textile Technology in the Middle Ages,” in The Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer et al., vol. 11 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), reprinted in Munro, Textiles, Town, and Trade: Essays in the Econo-
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weavers stretch out gold threads on pegs or pins and beat up the weft. From their woven silks they make the girdles and head-bands of wealthy women and the stoles of priests. Female wool-combers, in old pilches and filthy veils, sit combing their wool by the fire, near the privy and the bum-wipers. The women who wind silk thread into skeins are promiscuous sluts who sometimes clip the students’ purses. After this raunchy warning, Garland concludes his tour of Paris by describing the poultry and game birds that are sold in the new street before the square of Notre-Dame, and the various kinds of fish sold by the fishermen. Our second text (British Library, Additional MS 8167, fols. 88r90v) begins by discussing forms of address in writing a letter, then shifts to a discussion of how to write letters to creditors. “Some creditors,” the author remarks, “are urban, and some are rural.” He then lists some nineteen urban occupations and proceeds to describe them in turn. The vintner, he begins, should have wine of Anjou, Gascony, the Île-de-France, and Auvergne, rosé wine, spiced wines, grape juice, perry, vinegar, cider, and mead. He should serve wine to his customers in gold cups, mazers, and lidded cups.20 Drapers sell their wares both at fairs and in selds (covered bazaars).21 A draper should stock a variety of cloths, both cheap and
mic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries (Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum, 1994), Chap. 1; and Munro, “Textiles,” in Medieval Latin, ed. Mantello and Rigg, 474-84. On the gender shift in commercial weaving from female to male weavers (perhaps related to the introduction of the horizontal loom), see John Munro, “Medieval Woollens: Textiles, Textile Technology and Industrial Organisation, c. 800-1500,” in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, ed. David Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1: 191-7, 217-18, 221-2. 20 The German Rhenish and Moselle wines, much enjoyed by King John and by Henry III, are not mentioned here; perhaps they were too expensive for tavern use. The sweet wines of the eastern Mediterranean were not imported to England in quantity until the fourteenth century. A. D. Francis, The Wine Trade (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1972; New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 7-9, 15. Garland’s Commentarius (ed. Hunt, in Teaching and Learning Latin, 1: 221) notes national preferences in drink: France prefers white wine; Burgundy, red wine; Germany, mead; and England, ale. At Paris, he adds, spiced wines are expensive; cider, perry, and wine flavored with mulberry juice are sold there at Christmas. 21 Selds emerged at the end of the twelfth century in cities where property values in prime commercial streets were so high that many retail traders could not afford their own shop. Instead, they rented space in a seld and sold their goods from stalls or benches there. The selds were typically located behind
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expensive, including English broadcloths, heavy cloths for making hoods, and finer, lighter cloths for making robes for the betterdressed. His range of goods should also include scarlets, burnets, russets,22 imperials,23 and habergets, burels24 made in London or
the street frontages in upscale commercial streets, and enabled traders to enjoy a prime location at an affordable rent. See Derek Keene, “Shops and Shopping in Medieval London,” in Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in London, ed. Lindy Grant (British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions for the Year 1984, 1990), 38-43; D. M. Palliser, T. R. Slater, and E. Patricia Dennison, “The Topography of Towns 600-1300,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 1, 600-1540, ed. David M. Palliser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 184-5; and Derek Keene, “London from the Post-Roman Period to 1300,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 1: 201. For some early references to London selds, see W. O. Hassall, ed., Cartulary of St. Mary Clerkenwell, Camden Society, 3rd ser., 71 (1949), nos. 224-5, 256, 273, 327; M. Gibbs, ed., Early Charters of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, London, Camden Society, 3rd ser., 58 (1939), nos. 282, 302-5, 336; Emma Mason et al., eds, Westminster Abbey Charters, 1066-c. 1214, London Record Society, 25 (1988), no. 381. For a discussion of selds in other English towns, see D. Clark, “The Shop Within?: An Analysis of the Architectural Evidence for Medieval Shops,” Architectural History 43 (2000), 83-4, n. 6. 22 Scarlets, burnets, and russets were well-known types of woolen cloth in the thirteenth century. A list in Anglo-Norman of more than a hundred English towns and their attributes identifies Lincoln with scarlet, Stamford with haberget, Blyth with blanket, Beverley with burnet, and Colchester with russet. Bodleian Library, MS Douce 98, fols. 195-6; printed by C. Bonnier in “List of English Towns in the Fourteenth Century,” English Historical Review 16 (63) (1901): 501-3, and translated in Harry Rothwell, ed., English Historical Documents, Vol. 3, 1189-1327 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1975), “Some Thirteenth-Century English Places and Their Associations,” 881-4. The Bodleian catalogue of Douce manuscripts dates Douce 98 to c. 1320-30; Rothwell, however, follows Eleanora Carus-Wilson in dating this text to the mid thirteenth century. Scarlet was the very finest and most costly woolen, available in a range of colors. See Munro, “Medieval Woollens: Textiles, Textile Technology and Industrial Organisation, c. 800-1500,” 212-5. Burnet evidently was a very fine-quality woolen cloth. In 1231 Henry III’s tailor was sent to the fair of Bury St. Edmunds to buy ready-made clothing that included a “complete robe of black burnetta furred with squirrel.” In 1244 four “burnettos bene tinctos” and four black burnetas were listed among the expensive cloths and furs ordered for the king and queen to wear, respectively, at Whitsun and Christmas. Kay Staniland, “Clothing Provision and the Great Wardrobe in the Mid-Thirteenth Century,” Textile History 22 (1991), 243, 248. Russets were among the cheaper woolens. See E. M. Carus-Wilson, “The English Cloth Industry in the Late Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review 14 (1944), 32-50 (see especially pp. 33-4); reprinted in Eleanora M. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers: Collected Studies (London: Methuen, 1954), 211-38. 23 Imperial was an imported silk. According to the Oxford English Dictionary
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Beauvais, cordium and cordicium,25 and grisetum (evidently a gray woolen cloth) from Totnes and Cornwall. Next come sellers of foodstuffs. Our author lists more than two dozen types of fresh sea fish and freshwater fish that fishermen and fishmongers should sell. Butchers sell carcases and joints, both
(OED), s.v. “Imperial,” B. 3, citing Daniel Rock’s Textile Fabrics (1876): “At the end of the twelfth century there was brought to England from Greece, a sort of precious silk, named Imperial.” It evidently was so called because it was originally made in Constantinople. A silk called imperial was listed in an inventory of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1245. Lucca was producing a heavy cloth of gold called imperial by 1376, and Florence was still producing it in 1458, although lampas silks, including imperial, evidently had declined in popularity by then. In England, during the period 1325-1462 the Great Wardrobe purchased imperials only between the years 1379-1381 and 1422-1425. Lisa Monnas, “Silk Cloths Purchased for the Great Wardrobe of the Kings of England, 1325-1462,” in Ancient and Medieval Textiles: Studies in Honour of Donald King, ed. Lisa Monnas and Hero Granger-Taylor, Publications of the Pasold Research Fund (Leeds: W. S. Maney & Son, 1990), 285, 290, 297-9. In 1483, four pieces of “imperiall with Lukes golde” were bought for the coronation of Richard III. The Coronation of Richard III: The Extant Documents, ed. Anne F. Sutton and P. W. Hammond (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 112, 420. See also Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “Imperialis” (5). 24 Eleanora Carus-Wilson tentatively identified haberget as a woolen cloth with a distinctive diamond-patterned twill weave, woven on a warp-weighted loom, and resembling the texture of a chain-mail hauberk. Haberget was popular between the mid twelfth and mid thirteenth centuries, and evidently ranged in quality from very fine to very coarse because it was worn by both rich and poor. Eleanora Carus-Wilson, “Haberget: A Medieval Textile Conundrum,” Medieval Archaeology 13 (1969): 148-66 and Plates XV-XXV. Burel was a cheap woolen cloth, often purchased by the king for almsgiving or for servants’ clothing. See Carus-Wilson, “English Cloth Industry in the Late Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries,” 33-4; Staniland, “Clothing Provision and the Great Wardrobe in the Mid-Thirteenth Century,” 243. Andrew Woodger identified burel as a broadcloth woven on a warp-weighted loom (“The Eclipse of the Burel-Weaver,” 59-76). 25 I have been unable to identify cordium and cordicium. Cordium came in white and black, unshorn and shorn (grossum vel minuetum), while cordicium was striped. The mid thirteenth-century list of English towns and their attributes (Bodleian Library, MS Douce 98, fols. 195-6) mentions “Corde de Warwik” (line 55) and “Corde de Bredeport” (line 90) as the signature products of Warwick and Bridport. See Bonnier, “List of English Towns,” 501-3, and Rothwell, ed., English Historical Documents, Vol. 3, 1189-1327, 881-4. However, the MED defines “corde” simply as “a rope, line, cord, or string,” and I have been unable to find any reference to cloths with a corded or ribbed weave. There was a cloth called “card,” but it seems to have been a type of muslin. See Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “Carda;” OED, s.v. “Carde;” MED, s.v. “Carde” n.(3).
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salted and fresh, of beef, pork, goat, and mutton, and also offal, lard, tallow, cowhides and sheepskins. Poulterers sell all kinds of wild birds as well as domestic ones. Bakers offer a variety of fine and coarse breads. Their equipment includes not only an oven, sieve, bolting cloth, and molding-board, but also a dough-brake, which was a mechanical device for kneading large quantities of dough. Pastelers sell pasties, well-spiced and filled with meat, fish, poultry, or game, while flan-makers sell flans made of eggs, bread, and cheese, and waferers sell wafers and little cakes cooked in irons or ovens. Lastly, our author looks at the metal and leather crafts. A goldsmith’s stock should include altar plate, crowns, crosses, candelabra, tableware, and jewelry. Cutlers make various kinds of knives, razors, scissors, and shears. Girdlers sell belts of silk, linen, or leather; some of the girdles are plain, and some are decorated with round or square studs. Glovers offer a variety of lined and unlined gloves, including heavy work gloves; thin gloves for those who do no manual work; large, lined gloves for falconers; and seamless knitted gloves.26 Cordwainers work in tawed leather made of goatskin or sheepskin, from which they make a wide range of fine footwear. Both the hosier and the cobbler, however, work in cowhides. Cobblers make both leggings and shoes, but hosiers make leggings only and not shoes. Saddlers sell both saddles and shields in various styles. Skinners sell leather garments and fur linings and trimmings made of a wide range of skins and furs, from those of cats, dogs, and sheep, to those of dormice, squirrels, and sables. This treatise then ends abruptly with a description of the wares of the lorimers. They sell horse tack and spurs, in a variety of styles. Our third text consists of instructions for writing and responding to orders and requests, illustrated by ten model letters. Six of the letters represent exchanges between a fictitious earl and his vintner, draper, and skinner. In the first of these (Letter 2), the earl writes to his vintner to order two tuns of Gascon wine and three of wine of Anjou, at a price of 20s per tun, for a total of £5. He wishes to 26
Knitted liturgical gloves were used in Europe from the sixth or seventh century. See Irena Turnau, “The Diffusion of Knitting in Medieval Europe,” in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe: Essays in Memory of Professor E. M. Carus-Wilson, ed. N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting, Pasold Studies in Textile History, 2 (London: Heinemann Educational Books, for The Pasold Research Fund, 1983), 368-89, especially 375-82.
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buy these wines on credit, reminding the vintner of his excellent credit history and promising to pay in full on Palm Sunday. He ends, somewhat haughtily, by hoping that the vintner will behave in such a manner as to deserve his gratitude. The author then suggests a gracious reply for the vintner to send, with variant endings (Letters 3-4), depending on whether or not the customer has a good credit record. In the former case, the vintner recites the earl’s request, and the fact that he has always paid his bills, and concludes: “I agree to your present request and shall accommodate you with the five tuns that you have sought, trusting you that on the day named, as is your custom, you will pay your debt to me in full.” However, if the customer’s account is in arrears, the tradesman is advised to end his letter instead by saying, “I shall accommodate you with the five tuns of wine that you requested, beseeching you anxiously that you will pay me in full your old debt, which is in arrears, equally with this new debt, on the said day.” Next, the earl writes to his woolen-draper in London (Letter 5) to order sixty ells of scarlet cloth, again on credit. He acknowledges this time that his merits are somewhat equivocal, but hopes that the draper will accommodate him and give him the cloth, at the best possible price, until the Sunday after Easter, when he will pay in full. The earl hopes that he may have the cloth on these terms without a pledge, but if a pledge is required, he has sent ten gold rings and ten silver cups. He concludes, as in his previous letter, by trusting that the draper will act in such a way as to deserve his friendship. The earl then writes a rather obsequious letter to his skinner (Letter 6), to whom he owes money, saying that he needs furs for Easter but does not have the money to pay for them. He implores the skinner to accommodate him with twenty linings of gris and the same of vair (costly squirrel skins) and of fine-quality lambskins, on credit. If the skinner does not have these in stock, the earl asks him to obtain them elsewhere, promising to pay him on the appointed day. The earl addresses this letter to “his beloved skinner H.,” and sends “greetings and the fullest of love.” The skinner responds with a very polite letter (Letter 8), addressed to his “beloved friend,” saying that, unfortunately, he cannot accommodate the earl. The skinner explains that his own stock has been destroyed in a fire, and no one will lend him the money to make new purchases since he no longer has any collateral. He concludes
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by begging “that you do not take it amiss that I have not sent you what you requested, since you know the cause of the impediment.” The final business letter in this collection is another letter of refusal (Letter 9), this time written by an unidentified man to another man of similar status. The petitioner has evidently asked for some kind of favor or financial assistance, after having previously refused a similar request by the writer of the present letter. The writer’s tone this time is quite cutting, and he angrily reminds the petitioner that one ill turn deserves another: “you disdained to come to my aid. And so, henceforward, if you want to have a friend, you will have to be found [to be] a friend. Farewell.”27 The archival records of urban commerce traditionally consulted by economic historians provide crucial quantitative information on such topics as the production and distribution of goods; wages and prices; debt and credit; transaction costs; and the demography and topography of urban trade. The three texts discussed here touch on some of these topics, but their greatest value is in the considerable information that they provide on many complementary subjects. These include valuable descriptions of manufacturing techniques and working conditions; of the raw materials, tools, and other equipment used in the various crafts; of the shops, stalls, and street-furniture used by vendors; of credit practices, and commercial hazards. In a period for which commercial inventories are virtually non-existent, our first two texts provide detailed descriptions of the range of goods made, mended, and sold by urban artisans and retail traders, and make it clear that by the early 1200s many were already highly specialized. In the leather trades, for example, cordwainers made shoes of tawed leather, not tanned hide, hosiers made leather leggings but not shoes, and lorimers made bridles but not belts. In the food and drink trades, vintners sold wine but not ale, bakers baked bread but not wafers; and a variety of fast foods were offered by a similar variety of specialist cooks. In Paris, the goldsmiths, brooch-makers, hanapers, and cup-menders all occupied separate economic niches within the metal trades. Urban trades and crafts were a new topic for writers and artists in the thirteenth century, and the range of occupations in our texts
27
These letters, as well as Letters 1, 7, 10, and 11, will be discussed at length by Martha Carlin and David Crouch in their forthcoming volume on this manuscript.
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we get a somewhat more jaundiced view, written by and for those who lived on a student’s meager stipend or a scholar’s inadequate pay. While they might linger lovingly over the gold and silver plate of the goldsmiths, the elegant woolens of the drapers or the fine furs of the skinners, they also speak knowingly of down-market vendors and second-hand goods; of retailers who cheat their customers with false measures or adulterated products; and of the exorbitant cost and dubious quality of unhealthy but irresistible convenience foods. (The hot pies and flans described here were among the principal fast-foods of medieval towns. Such foods were avoided by the wealthy but were a staple of poor urban households, which often lacked the means to make a hot meal. The presence of fast-food cooks in towns is thus a gauge of urban poverty, not plenty.)30 Our third text also reminds us that even aristocratic shoppers needed to ask for credit, and it lays out standard procedures for buying and selling by correspondence, in Latin, and even for writing an angry rejection letter. Together, these three texts, and others like them, can clearly add much to our understanding of shops and shopping in the thirteenth century.
30 See Martha Carlin, “Fast Food and Urban Living Standards in Medieval England,” in Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal (London and Rio Grande, Ohio: Hambledon Press, 1998), 27-51.
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APPENDICES A Note on the Translations in Appendices I-III In translating these texts I have drawn heavily on the texts and glosses in Tony Hunt’s Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England, 3 vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991). For John of Garland’s Dictionarius I have also consulted the only previous translation: Barbara Blatt Rubin’s The Dictionarius of John de Garlande and the Author’s Commentary (Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1981), which she based on Thomas Wright’s edition in A Volume of Vocabularies ... from the Tenth Century to the Fifteenth, in Joseph Mayer (ed.), A Library of National Antiquities, vol. 1 ([Liverpool]: privately printed, 1857), 121-38.) I have also checked the editions of the Dictionarius in Hercule Géraud, ed., Paris sous Philippe-le -Bel, Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire de France (Paris: Imprimerie de Crapelet, 1837), Appendice II, “Dictionnaire de Jean de Garlande,” 580-612; Thomas Wright (described above); and August Scheler, Lexicographie latine du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle. Trois traités de Jean de Garlande, Alexandre Neckam et Adam du Petit Pont, publiés avec les gloses françaises (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1867), 1-83. In addition to dictionaries of Classical Latin I have also used the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. R. E. Latham et al. (London: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 1975-, in progress); R. E. Latham’s Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources (London: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 1965, reprint 1973), the online versions of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the Middle English Dictionary (MED), and various other medieval word-lists (cited in the notes). I owe deep thanks to Richard Monti and Susan Reynolds for general assistance with the Latin, to Richard Hoffman for kindly supplying me with information on fish terminology, and to David Crouch for assistance with the vocabulary of heraldry and aristocratic correspondence. Any errors that remain are mine alone. A number of the readings given below are very tentative; I would be grateful to receive any corrections or suggestions for amending them.
APPENDIX I Translation of the Description of Shops and Shopping in Paris in John of Garland’s Dictionarius The following translation is based on paragraphs 9-46, 50-4, 66-70, and 72 of the text edited by Tony Hunt in Teaching and Learning Latin, 1: 191-203. To facilitate comparison with Hunt’s edition I have included his paragraph numbers below.
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1-8. [After a preliminary discussion of parts of the body, Garland abruptly shifts to a description of the goods for sale in Paris.] 9.
Today one of our neighbors carried a pole of shoes for sale: laced shoes with pointed toes and buckled shoes, boots (tibialia), and leggings (cruralia), and the boots (crepitas) worn by women and monks.
10.
Girdlers have before them white, black, and red [leather] belts, wellstudded (bene membratas) with iron and copper, and girdles of woven silk, well-barred (bene stipata) with silver.31
11.
Saddlers sell saddles, both bare and painted, and also saddle pads (panellos), pillions (pulvillos),32 canvas (carentivillas), and pack-saddles (trusulas), and stirrups (strepas).
12.
Shield-makers benefit the citizens of all France (or, in some MSS, England); they sell to knights shields covered with cloth, leather, and brass, painted with lions and with fleurs de lis (leonibus et foliis liliorum depicta).
13.
Buckle-makers are enriched by their buckles, straps, and bits; by their files, and their bridles (loralia).
14.
William, our neighbor, has in the market before him the following goods for sale: needles and needle-cases, soap, mirrors, razors, whetstones, and fire-irons.33
15.
Lorimers are highly esteemed by noble knights for their silvered and gilded spurs, their resonant poitrels (pectoralia resonancia),34 and their well-made bridles.
31
Hunt’s index of glosses includes barre as a gloss for clavis, barrés as a gloss for membratas, and barré as a gloss for stipata (Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, 3: 37, 101, 156, 202). A fifteenth-century copy of Garland’s Dictionarius with English interlinear glosses (British Library, MS Harley 1002, fol. 176v) translates membratas here as ystodyd, and stipata as ybarryd (ornamented with metal strips). See Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “Membrare” (2), and MED, s.v. “Barre” (6). For a fourteenth-century silk girdle ornamented with metal bars and excavated in London, see Geoff Egan and Frances Pritchard, Medieval Finds from Excavations in London, 3: Dress Accessories, c. 1150-c. 1450 (London: HMSO, 1991), 48, fig. 30. 32 Cf. MED, s.v. “Piln.” 33 Piricudia vel fusillos: fusillos could also mean spindles, but here it seems to be used as a synonym for pyricudia (fire-irons). See Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word-List, s.v. “Pyr,” and MED, s.v. “Fir” 4(c). 34 The poitrels (or peytrels) here were breast-straps for horses, since there were as yet no breastplates. Cf. MED, s.v. “Poitrel.” They were often hung with jingling bells or pendants, which presumably is why Garland calls them “resonant.” See the description of the lorimers in Appendix II, below; cf. Holmes, Daily Living in the Twelfth Century, 20-1.
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16.
Today I saw a peddler who had before him table knives and small knives (cultellos ad mensam, mensaculas et artavos), sheaths great and small, styluses, and grafting knives.
17.
Furbishers of swords pile up pence by selling well-polished swords that have gleaming pommels and hilts and new scabbards.
18.
Merchants dwelling on the Grand-Pont sell halters, breech-girdles (drawstring belts for men’s drawers), straps, and purses made of deerskin, sheepskin, and pigskin.
19.
Glovers bilk the scholars of Paris by selling them unlined gloves, gloves lined with lambskin, rabbit fur, and fox fur, and mittens made of leather.
20.
Hatters make hats of felt and peacock feathers, and caps of cotton (pillea de bombace), and little caps of wool and fur (pilleola de lana et pilis).
21.
At the Porte St-Lazare dwell the bowyers, who make crossbows and bows of maple, viburnum, and yew, and bolts and arrows of ash.
22.
The brooch-makers have before them large and small brooches (firmacula) made of lead and tin, iron and copper. They also have beautiful pendants (monilia)35 and little ringing bells.
23.
There are subtle artificers who make bells of sonorous bronze by which, in churches, the hours of the day are announced by the movement of the clappers and of the pulled ropes.
24.
There are lowly cobblers who stitch together old shoes, renewing the patches, the welts, the soles, and the uppers.
25.
Cordwainers are those who make footwear of tawed leather. They benefit the city of Paris by saving lasts for shoes and boots36 and spatulas (shoehorns or foot-measures?).37 They cut the leather, which has been dyed black, with a cobbler’s knife, and sew the footwear with an awl and linen thread and a pig bristle.
35
In Classical Latin, monilia in this context would normally have meant necklaces or collars, but Hunt’s glosses translate it as fermals, nuches, anglice broche. 36 For formipedia (lasts) and equitibialia (lasts for boots), see MED, s.v. “Lest(e);” cf. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “Formipedia.” 37 The meaning of spatulas is unclear; either “shoehorns” or “foot-measures” would perhaps best fit the context, but both Garland’s glosses and modern dictionaries of Latin or Middle English translate spatula simply as “slice” (a spatula; a flat-bladed utensil used for stirring, mixing, or applying compounds or cleaning wounds). The MED also gives a secondary meaning as a surgical tool for cutting or lancing.
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26. Skinners grow rich by their pilches (pellicia) and skins sewn together to make fur linings (penulas, furraturas), some made of lambskin, some of catskin, some of the skins of hares, some of fox skins. Skinners sell delightful pelts of coneys and [?eastern] squirrels (cyrogrillorum), and of [?western] squirrels (esperiolorum), which are smaller than [?eastern] squirrels, according to Isidore [of Seville], and of otters and weasels. But they sell more dearly vair and gris (cisinum), and trimmings (urlas) of sable and dormouse (laerone).38 27.
There are some criers of pilches to mend who go about the streets of Paris, and they repair the fur linings (furraturas) of surcotes and mantles, partly by stealing (furando).39
28.
Menders of cups cry that they will repair cups with bronze and silver wire. They mend mazers and cups of plane and birch, maple and aspen.
29.
Wine-criers cry, with gaping throat, wine that was broached40 in the taverns, at fourpence, sixpence, eightpence, and twelvepence, carrying wine poured from a gallon jug into a hanap for sampling.
30.
Street-sellers of light pastries (nebularum) and wafers cry out their light pastries and wafers and rissoles (artocreas: fried balls of spiced fruit, minced meat, or marrow)41 at night, selling them from baskets covered
38
Cisinum meant both vair and gris, which were the choicest squirrel skins. They came from the coldest parts of Northern and Central Europe, especially from Scandinavia and Russia, but also from Poland and Bulgaria. Vair was the whole skin of the red squirrel in wintertime, when it had a gray back and white belly, and gris was the gray winter back alone. On the terminology of the medieval fur trade, see Veale, English Fur Trade, 218-29. Glosses for urlas occur in one MS. of the Dictionarius as hourles (cf. modern French ourler, “to hem,” and ourlet, “hem”), and in another as rewers, probably in the modern sense of “revers” (the turned-back edge of a garment, such as a lapel, displaying the reversed edge). Hunt, ed., Teaching and Learning Latin, 2: 130,153; cf. Veale, English Fur Trade, 221, s.v. “Revers.” 39 Garland’s play on words here is meant to remind his students not to confuse furs with furtiveness. The text used by Wright and Rubin gives this final clause as partim furando, while Hunt’s version reads et eorum partem furando. 40 Vinum attaminatum. See Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “Attaminare;” and MED, s.vv. “Attamen” 2; “Brochen” 3(a); cf. modern French entamer. For reading it instead as “filtered,” see Latham, Revised Medieval Word-List, s.v. “Attamino” (2): to bolt (flour); cf. “Tamisium” (sieve). 41 Artocreas, which commonly means meat pies or pasties, here is glossed with variants of rossole or russole. See MED, s.v. “Risheu,” fried balls of minced fruit, sugar, and spices, or of minced meat or marrow mixed with egg and spices. Cf. Constance B. Hieatt and Sharon Butler, eds., Curye On Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century (Including The Forme of Cury), Early English Text Society, SS. 8 (1985), 212, s.v. “Ruscheues.”
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MARTHA CARLIN
with a white towel, and the baskets are often hung at the windows of clerks as gaming forfeits. 31.
Regrators send out their male and female servants into the streets to deceive the clerks, to whom they sell—very dearly—cherries, white and black plums, unripe apples and pears, and lettuce, cress, and chervil.
32.
Simnels, quiches, and butter cakes42 lie in the windows of the regrators, along with soft and hard cheeses, and sulphured candles, which have large wicks to make them burn better.
33.
The bakers of Paris knead dough and form loaves, which they bake in an oven that has been wiped clean with a cloth. They sell bread made of wheat, rye, barley, oats, maslin (a mixture of wheat and rye), and, frequently, of bran. The bakers have male and female servants who sift the coarse flour with a fine sieve and mix the yeast into the dough to make the bread rise in the trough. Sometimes they also scrape out the bins with a dough-scraper.43
34.
Pastelers make a huge profit by selling to clerks pasties of pork, chicken, and eels, seasoned with pepper, and putting out for sale tarts and flans stuffed with soft cheeses and eggs, healthful, but often dirty.
35.
Cooks (i.e., fast-food cooks, who sell take-away food) turn and roast geese, pigeons, and capons on hazelwood spits, but often they sell raw meat, badly seasoned with sauces and garlic, to the foolish servants of the scholars. The butchers in their shambles hate them (i.e., the scholars), selling them coarse flesh of beef, mutton, and pork, sometimes measled, brandishing their cleavers and great knives at the scholars. But these slaughterers are slain (mactantur) by the angry scholars because of the filthy andouilles, sausages, black puddings, and tripes that they assemble (conveniunt) for the poor rabble.
36.
The money-changers count out money of Paris, sterlings, bezants, and other gleaming coins on their boards on the Grand-Pont, hoping to make a big profit while evading the crime of usury.
42 Placente is glossed as symeneus. A simnel was a fine white bread or roll, evidently boiled like a bagel before being baked. Flamic[i]e, which the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources defines as flawns or custard tarts, is glossed here as flamiches. In modern French cookery, a flamiche is a quiche or tart, with a single or double crust. Ignacie is glossed as fouaches, anglice þerife kakez. Fouaces were cakes made of butter and eggs, according to Alfred Franklin, Dictionnaire des arts, métiers, et professions exercés dans Paris depuis le treizième siècle (Paris, 1906; reprint New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 396. The Middle English adjective therf or tharf meant unleavened. See MED, s.v. “Therf.” 43 Archas etiam radunt aliquando cum costa pastali. For dough-scraper (literally, dough-rib), see MED, s.v. “Rib(be)” n.(3).
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37.
The moneyers who mint money appear to be rich and yet are not. Although they coin pennies, the pennies are not theirs,44 but are sent to the Exchange to be exchanged by the money-changers (a cambitoribus vel a campsoribus) hoping to make a profit.
38.
The goldsmiths sit before their furnaces and tables on the Grand-Pont, and make hanaps of gold and silver, brooches, pendants (monilia), pins, and buttons, and they select jasper, sapphire, and emerald gemstones for rings.
39.
The skill (industria) of the goldsmiths pounds gold and silver leaf on an iron anvil with delicate little hammers, and encloses precious gems within the cavities45 of the rings that are worn by barons and gentlewomen.
40.
The artificers who are called hanapers decorate vessels with gold and silver fittings and put feet on hanaps and crown them with rims to make them stronger, more durable, more precious, more salable.
41.
Drapers, driven by greed, sell false white and black woolen cloths, camelins and blues and imitation burnets, greens, imitation scarlets, striped cloths, and stamforts (or stanforts).46 They defraud buyers by measuring the cloths badly with a short ell and a false thumb (or inch: police fallaci).
44
Here, instead of Hunt’s “Licet denarios monetant, sed non sunt denarii” (cap. 37), I follow Géraud (p. 594, cap. XXXVI), Wright (p. 128), and Scheler (p. 27, cap. 37) in reading “sui” in place of “sed.” 45 anchas, glossed as fosses and fosces. 46 “Pannarii, nimia cupiditate ducti, fallaces vendunt pannos albos et nigros, camelinos, et blodios et burneticos, virides, scarleticos, radiatos et stanford[i]os.” Hunt (Teaching and Learning Latin, 3: 25) includes glosses for camelinos as camelin and camelot (camlet). Camelin was a woolen fabric mixed with silk or other fibers. See MED, s.v. “Camelin.” According to the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources it could also be cloth made of (or imitatng) camel’s hair. Camlet evidently was a similar cloth; in the late fifteenth century it was a “fine fabric, often of mixed silk and wool.” Sutton and Hammond, Coronation of Richard III, 419. The glosses in Hunt’s edition (3: 22, 145) translate burneticos simply as burnet and scarleticos as escarlez or scarlet. However, the high value of burnets and scarlets, coupled with Garland’s emphasis on the drapers’ dishonesty, suggests that these “burnet-ish” and “scarlet-ish” cloths were ersatz. On striped cloths, see Walton, “Textiles,” 341; and Munro, “Medieval Woollens: Textiles, Textile Technology and Industrial Organisation,” 183. On stamforts or stanforts (coarse, light cloths with a strong, ungreased worsted warp and a greased woolen weft), see Munro, “Medieval Woollens: The Western European Woollen Industries and Their Struggles for International Markets, c. 1000-1500,” in Cambridge History of Western Textiles, ed. Jenkins, 229-30.
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51.
Dyers of woolen cloths dye cloths with woad and red madder (cum gaudone, rubea maiore et sandice),50 on account of which they have dyed nails, of which some are black, some blue, some red, and so they are spurned by pretty women, unless they are accepted for the sake of cash.
52.
Tanners work hard tanning horsehides and oxhides in hollow treetrunks, and they scrape the hides with a knife called a scraper. They turn the hides frequently in their tanbark solution so that the raw stench of the hides will dissipate.
53.
On an anvil, with hammers and tongs and the puffing of bellows, smiths make coulters and plowshares, horseshoes, the iron edge for a spade or shovel, or mattocks or hoes, not forgetting scythes for the meadow grasses and sickles for grains.
54.
In hot water, cooks cleanse cauldrons (cacabos) and jugs (urceos), pans (patellas) and frying-pans (sartagines), basins (pelves), ewers (ydrias), pots (ollas), mortars (mortaria), dishes (scutellas), platters (rotundalia),51 saucers (acetabula), spoons (coclearia), bowls (scaphas),52 gridirons (craticulas), graters (micatoria), [and] meat-hooks (creagra), while they stand before their ovens and fireplaces and furnaces.53
55-65. [Garland next discusses home furnishings and clothing, giving examples from his own dwelling; the proper books and vestments of a priest; church vessels; the duties of a stableboy; and the tools used by women, with a lewd final comment about the latter. He then continues.] 66.
50
Women weavers (textrices) lead their bobbin-sticks or shuttles (ducunt pectines: “combs”) through the warp-threads with the weft-thread (per stamina cum trama), which is drawn from a spool and spindle (que trahitur a spola et pano). The woman weaver then beats up the weftthread with her slay or weaver’s sword (Ipsa vero textrix percutit tramam cum lama), turns the spool on the windlass (involvit spolam in troclea),54
Sandix is glossed variously as both woad and madder, and this confusion seems to have been common. See Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, 3: 142-3; Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word-List, s.v. “Sandix;” and MED, s.vv. “Mader(e),” “Sandix,” “Warance,” “Weld(e),” and “Wod(e).” In Classical Latin, sandix meant vermilion or a color like it. 51 See MED, s.v. “Plater.” 52 Glossed as gates; cf. Garland’s Commentarius, where scapha or gate is described as a wooden bowl in which feet are washed (in Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, 1: Texts, 219); and MED, s.vv. “Bolle” n.(2); “Gate” n.(3). 53 Fornaces: in a culinary context, a fornax can be an oven, a stove (for barbecue-style countertop cooking), or a built-in cauldron for boiling. Cf. MED, s.v. “Furnais(e).” 54 This phrase is puzzling. A troclea was a winch or windlass: see Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, 3: Indexes, 170; and the online Anglo-Norman
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fish: gamaros)59 with hooks and nets, and porpoises (?or sharks: canes marini) are taken from the sea.60 73-84. [Garland concludes with discussions of domestic and wild beasts, garden plants, trees, house-construction, ships, instruments of martyrdom, musicians and their instruments, prostitutes and dancing-girls tormented by serpents (as punishment for their sins), Paradise, and the Last Judgment.]
APPENDIX II Transcription and translation of British Library, Additional. MS 8167, fols. 88r-90v. This transcription is based on that printed by G[eorg] Waitz in "Handschriften in englischen Bibliotheken," Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für altere Deutsche Geschichtskunde 4 (1879): 339-43. I have re-checked the manuscript and made a number of corrections to Waitz’s transcript. I have silently modernized the punctuation, use of “u” and “v,” and capitalization, but have used italics to show expanded abbreviations. Waitz mistakenly identified this treatise as having been written in a fourteenth-century hand. In fact, the entire volume, which contains a collection of dictaminal and legal materials, evidently was written in the first half of the thirteenth century. A note on fol. 2r (a front fly-leaf) records that it was acquired for Westminster Abbey by William de Hasele. Hasele, who died as sub-prior of Westminster before May 1283, had probably obtained the volume before 1250, since additional notes on fol. 2r record a dispute during the abbacy of Richard de Crokele (or Crokesle) in 1250, and national events of 1258, together with Crokele’s death at Winchester in 1258 on the feast of St. Kenelm the Martyr (17 July). Article 5 in the 59
Gamaros: the glosses here read espinoches, espinocles, and esperling (one MS. also gives “gamerus gallice vocatur tenche”). None glosses gamaros as lobsters (cf. Classical Latin cammarus), and some kind of fish would indeed make better sense here than lobsters, since the gamaros are listed with other fish caught with hooks and nets. The MED identifies sperling(e) as a “fish of the family Clupeidae, esp. the sprat (Clupea sprattus); ... also, the pilchard (Sardinia pilchardus); also, any small fish of the genus Merlangus, such as the whiting (Merlangus merlangus), or of the family Salmonidae, such as the grayling (Thymallus thymallus), or perh. the European smelt (Osmerus eperlanus).” 60 In the editions of Hunt and Scheler (p. 35, cap. 72), the last clause reads: “quia canes marini ab equore devehuntur.” Here I am following the editions of Géraud (p. 608, cap. LXX) and Wright (p. 135), which begin this clause with “et” instead of “quia.” The Oxford Latin Dictionary defines canis marinus as shark or dogfish (a small inshore shark), and the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources as seal or possibly dogfish, but Richard Hoffman has suggested (pers. comm.) that here it may instead mean porpoise, which was the meaning used by Albertus Magnus in De animalibus and, in the sixteenth century, by Conrad von Gessner in Historia animalium.
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volume (fols. 88r-133r), a miscellaneous dictaminal and legal collection, was probably compiled at Oxford between 1220 and 1240, and this treatise is the earliest known English dictaminal treatise.61 For further discussion of this volume and its contents, see H. G. Richardson, “An Oxford Teacher of the Fifteenth Century,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 23 (2) (1939): 3-24. Transcription [fol. 88r] Personarum quedam sunt ecclesiastice, quedam seculares, et tam harum quam illarum quedam sunt sumperiores [sic], quedam inferiores, quedam infime. Superiores sunt vero dominus papa, archiepiscopi, episcopi, abbates, priores. Inferiores sunt vero archidiaconi, decani, officiales, parsone, vicarii. Infime sunt presbiteri parochiani, summonitores, et simplices clerici. Superiores seculares, imperatores, reges, comites, duces, barones; inferiores sunt justiciarii, vicecomites, constabularii, forestarii, viredarii, miles, burgenses, libere tenentes. Infime sunt bedelli, rustici, sutores et omnes officiarii, sive ministri sive ministrelli, tam urbani quam rurales. Si superior persona scribat inferiori, superior debet preponi per nominativum casum, inferior postponi per dativum casum. Si inferior persona scribat superiori, superior debet preponi per dativum casum, inferior postponi per nominativum casum. Si autem par scribat pari, ut miles militi, burgensis burgensi, uterlibet potest preponi alii, set causa benivolencie captande, in literis petitoriis solet ille cui scribitur preponi per dativum casum. In omni peticione facta superiori vel pari debet petitus pluraliter designari. De literis vero creditoriis [corrected in MS from creditores] primo dicere proponemus, quod creditorum quedam [recte quidam] sunt urbani, quedam 61 For the dating of the treatise and of Additional MS 8167, and the latter’s acquisition by Hasele and presentation to Westminster Abbey, see Richardson, “An Oxford Teacher,” 447-50; and H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, “Early Coronation Records,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 13 (1936): 135. According to the British Library’s online catalogue, a mortgage on fol. 95r (line 5), dated 30 years after Henry III’s coronation, “is either a scribal error or indicates that most of art. 5 was written after 1246.” Richardson believed that this date was “a later modification” (“An Oxford Teacher,” 448, n.2). However, in the manuscript the year is given as 30 years from the birth (a carnacione) of Henry III (1 October 1207), not his coronation (a coronatione, 28 October 1216). Richardson noted two later versions of both this treatise and of our third text in two Cambridge manuscripts: Gonville and Caius College, MS 205, pp. 2 55-64 (1270s), and Corpus Christi College, MS 297, fols. 135v-138r (beginning of the fourteenth century?). Richardson, “An Oxford Teacher,” 447, 449-50. I have checked both manuscripts. Neither seems to derive directly from Additional MS 8167, and the Corpus Christi College manuscript (hereafter CCC 297) does not appear to derive directly from the manuscript in Gonville and Caius College (hereafter G & C 205/111).
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[recte quidam] rurales. Urbani vero vinetarius, pannarius sive drapparius, piscator, carnifex, auceps, pistor, pastillarius, flaonarius, aurifaber, zonarius, cerotecarius, cellarius, alutarius, cordevanarius, corvesarius, husuarius sive ocrearius, loremarius, pelliparius et consimiles. Et de unoquoque istorum suo loco dicemus. Vinetarius vinum habeat andegavense, gasconense, francense, averenense, vinum raspatum, zeduarizatum, saxifragiatum, pigmentum, claretum, mustum, piretum, acetum, siseram, medum sive ydromellum. Item vinitarius vendat vinum per modios, per dolea [corrected in MS from doleos] sive tonellos, per pipas, per sextaria, per dimidium sextarium, per lagenas sive galones, per potellos sive floxeos [sic], per quartas, per pintas, scilicet dimidias quartas. Iterum vinitarius habeat in cellare suo utres, cados, infusoria sive intonellaria, clepsedres sive dusellos, costrellos, alvealos [added in different hand in margin: pulanos], tabulum [?recte terebellum: gimlet or auger]62 sive penetralium sive persorium. Item habeat [fol. 88v] ciphos aureos sive de murra vel de macera, cuppos cum cooperculis cuppatos. Pannarius in celda sua vel ad nundinas habeat telas varias et multimodas de vili precio sive de vili foro, et habeat telas de foro cari [sic; added in different hand in margin: vel magni]. Item habeat telas angligenas latas habentes latitudinem duarum ulnarum, vel minus vel pauloplus [sic], etiam cum lisuris, telas densiores vel spissiores ad capatium faciendum, vel magis tenues sive minus spisses [recte spissas] et melius vestientes [sic] ad robas faciendas. Item habeat scarletam nigram, albam vel virede coloratam; burnetam nigram vel sanguineam; burnetam coloratam violetam, rugetam, persum, bluetam, wagetam, plucatam; russetum nigrum vel album. Item [habeat] russetum de Laycestre vel de Oxonia. Item habeat grossum russetum vel minuetum, burellum London’ vel burellum de Beaveis, imperiale russetum, imperiale bluetum, haubergentum album de Stanford’, haubergentum russetum, haubergentum tinctum in viride, vel in burnetam, vel in bluetum, vel in nigrum, vel in rubeum. Item habeat album cordium, [added above line: nigrum,] grossum vel minuetum, cordicium radiatum. Item habeat grisetum de Totenais, de Cornubia. Piscator, qui hamo vel reti vel lancea, sive piscarius, qui vendit pisces, habeat pisces marinos vel aque dulcis, vel limosos sive platias, et balenas sive tecefocas [corrected in MS from tecesfocas; recte cetefocas], sturgiones, cungros, pectines sive plaiceos, lupos aquaticos sive luceos, murenas sive lampredas, murenulas sive lampredulas, mecaros sive makerellos, salmones, conchilia [glossed above the word as wolk], sperlingos, bremnas [recte bremias], radeas, rocheos, merlingos, tencas, hadoccos, anguillas, gugiones, celluras [?recte siluros] sive minusas, lochias, caridones [recte capitones],63 verrones.
62 The later of the two Cambridge manuscripts (CCC 297, p. 317) gives “terebellum” here. 63 Both later manuscripts (G & C 205/111, p. 261, and CCC 297, p. 319)
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Macerarius habeat salsas carnes et recentes, bovinas, caprinas, porcinas, agninas, edulinas, vitulinas, porcellinas; item habeat bacones, perrias [recte pernas], sive petafulsus [recte petasiculos or petasunculos].64 Item habeat carcosia boum, ovium, arietum, sive multonum. Item habeat bacones ustos, scaturizatos. Item habeat porchetum pudratum vel in succedio positum. Item habeat lardum, saimum, unctum porcinum, [added in different hand in margin: et sepum] ovinum. Item habeat vicera porcorum vel boum vel ovium, et tripas boum vel ovium. Item habeat corea bovina et pelles ovinas. Item habeat secures quibus [boves] excribere [recte excerebret], et carnes porcorum dividant [recte dividat], et clunacula, attavos [recte artavos], unde porcos, oves et boves evicerant [recte evicerat] et excoreant [recte excoreat].65 [fol. 89r] Auceps sive aucuparius habeat aves silvestres et agrestes et domesticas, marinos vel ripeos. Item habeat ardeas sive airones, cigonios, perdices [corrected in MS from perdicas], geturnices [recte coturnices], castrimargios, wodecok, pluviarios, grues sive cignes [recte cignos] sive cleres [recte olores],66 malardos, mergites, pavones, anderes [recte anseres or anceres], aucas domesticas et alias, scilicet aucas albas, bisas, auculas, capones, gallos, gallinas, pullos, columbas, turtura, malvicia. Item capit volucres in visco vel tendiculis vel laqueis vel reti stante vel pendente, ut omnes volucres et campestres ut nisi [sic] et alias minutas [sic] capi possint, ut domiciliarios sive scingudarios [sic].67 Pistor habeat panem azimum et panem furvum et panem triticeum, ordeaceum, sigilinum, avenatum. Item habeat placencia, libia, liba, infungia, panem album, panem furmenteum [?recte fermenteum], panem bultatum, tribratum [recte cribratum], saclatum sive temesatum, et libia piperata, cokettos. Item
give “capitones” here. 64 CCC 297, p. 318, reads “pernas sive petasunculos” here. 65 This sentence is clearly defective. Clearer versions can be found in the two Cambridge manuscripts. G & C 205/111, p 259, reads: “Item habeat secures quibus boves excerebrat, et clunacula quibus carnes porcinas dividat.” CCC 297, p. 318, reads: “Item habeat macerarius secures quibus boves excerebret et porcos et carnes dividat.” 66 CCC 297, p. 318, reads “olores” (swans) here. 67 This last sentence seems corrupt. A much fuller version is given in the earlier of the two Cambridge manuscripts, G & C 205/111, p. 259: “Item volucres vel volatilia capit visco, tendiculis, laqueis, panteris, vel rethi pendente, vel castrimarginario rethe, vel rethe stante vel jacente. Item habeat recia [sic] unde capiat in rama nisos sive spervarios, ancipitres. Et tumberellos ut passeres et alias aves minutas domiciliaria et severundalia capi possit [recte possunt].” CCC 297, p. 318, has a version of this passage that combines elements from both of the other texts and introduces new ones: “Item volucres capit visco, vel tendiculis, laqueis, panteris, vel reti pendente, vel stante, vel castrimagiarum; et omnes volucres silvestres et campestres, ut nisos sive spervarios, vel trappis ut perdices, vel etiam reti quo anglice dicitur lof, vel cum tumberello ut passeres et alias aves minutas ut domiciliaria, sive severundaria.”
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habeat pistrinum, furnum, sive clibanum, confractorem. Item habeat polentridium, rotabulum, item ceotelatam [?recte cribelatam] farinam, florem frumenti. Item [habeat panem]68 coctum in clibano vel in fornace vel in saritagine vel in cratela. Pastillarius habeat pastillos de carnibus, de piscibus, bene piperatos. Item habeat de farina [recte ferina] sive venacionis vel carne domestica vel de feris vel de volucribus sive de volatilibus. De feris vero cerve vel de cerva, caprea, vel dama, leporis lardo, avibus marinis vel silvestribus [corrected in MS from silvestrisbus] vel domesticis, que superius enumerantur. Iterum flaonarius habeat opacos, artocopos, flaones de ovis, pane et caseo compositas. Wafrarius habeat wafras vel lagana in ferris vel in furnis decoctas. Aurifaber habeat opus tam ductile quam fusile. Operatur enim in metallis et in lapidibus. Metallum vero ductile vel fusile est, sed lapis scruptilis [recte scriptilis] tantum. Operatur siquando in auro, in argento, cupro, [added in different hand in margin: vel trifurat]69 stagno, auritallo [recte auricalco]. Item habeat opus concavum vel solidum, planum vel planatum, inpressum vel insculptum. Item faciet calices, platenas, [added in different hand above line: ollas] iustas, coronas, pelves, ampollas, fioles, filateria, cruces aureas vel argenteas, [fol. 89v] vel de ligno brateis sive laminis auri vel argento cooperato; candelabrum, coclearea. Item habeat ciphos de macera cum pede aureo vel argenteo, et superius aureo vel argenteo circumdatos. Item habeat cupas cum cooperculis et ciphos planos. Item habeat crateres vel crateras cum trifuris vel planos vel sculptos, scutellas, parapsides, salsaria et salleria. Item faciat anulos, firmacula, monilia, catenas, membra zonarum. Item habeat folliculos, forcipes, inclinum [?recte incudem, an anvil],70 malleos, et totum ad metallum purgandum, et mola [recte molam] ad aciem ferro conferendam, pedem etiam leporis et corte [?recte corium gremiale, leather apron] ad gramina [?recte grana] metallorum colligendum [recte colligenda] et expurgendum [recte extergenda].71 Habeat etiam vasa varia et minuta, aurifragium, filum argenteum, tabellam oblitam ad flosculos protrahendos. 68 Both of the Cambridge manuscripts (G & C 205/111, p. 260, and CCC 297, p. 319) supply “habeat panem” here. 69 Cf. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word-List, s.v. “Tri/folium, -/fura.” 70 G & C 205/111, p. 261, has “incudem” (glossed as “anveld”) here. 71 Where Additional MS 8167 reads “corte ad gramina metallorum colligendum et expurgendum,” the two Cambridge manuscripts (G & C 205/111, p. 261, and CCC 297, p. 319) read, respectively, “corium gremale ad grana colligenda,” and “corium gremiale ad gramina metallorum colligenda et extergenda.” For the translation “leather apron,” see the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “gremialis,” 3. Compare this description of the goldsmith with that of Alexander Nequam in De nominibus utensilium (in Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, 1: 189; translated in Holmes, Daily Living in the Twelfth Century, 142). In Nequam’s text, the goldsmith is advised to have a hare’s foot with which he can polish gold or silver and also collect the small particles of metals, lest they be lost in his leather apron.
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Cutellarius faciat varios cultellos, clunacula venatorum, artavos scriptorum vel dolatorum. Habeat mensacula, sive cultellos ad zonam pendentes, cultellos etiam planos. Item faciat novaculas sive rasoria, forfices, cesuras, et cetera. Zonarius habeat zonas de cerico, lino, vel de coreo, scilicet nigro, rubeo vel albo, plusculas de ferro, cupro. Item habeat planas zonas vel barratas sive membratas, membris rotundis vel quadratis. Cerotecarius habeat cerotecas grossas, messoribus et fossoribus aptas, minutas ad opus non laborancium, opere scilicet manuali, servili, ad cardanos et spinas trahendos vel colligendos. Item habeat cerotecas duplices et singulas, pilosas vel planas. Habeat cerotecas magnas et duplices ad opus falconarii. Item, [habeat]72 cerotecas laneas, et inconsutiles desuper, et totum contextas. Allutarius habeat allutam veram de pellibus caprinis, de pellibus ovinis. Habeat estivalia, crepidas sive botas, largas, [fol. 90r] tentone munitas ad opus hominum, vel stricas [recte strictas] ad opus feminarum. Item habeat sotulares pecatos [?recte picatos], vel sotulares cum medullis corrigiis laqueatos. Item habeat sotulares cum colariis ligulis ad opus militum. Husurarius [sic] et sutor in coreis bovinis operantur. Sutor quidem ocreas sive husas faciat et sotulares pariter varios et multimodos [corrected in MS from multimodas] ut allutarius, sed husarios [recte husarius] tantum faciet ocreas et non sotulares. Sellarius cellas habeat diversas et varias, ad opus monachi cum articulis [?recte arculis]73 divisis et latis non coloratis, insculptas ad opus militum, domine, armig[er]i [in MS, armigi], et parsone et presbiteri, ad equum, ad palefridum, ad sumentorium. Item habeat singulas et cellas verniculatas [recte vermiculatas], albas, vel auro vel cinoplo coloratas [corrected in MS from colaratas], flosculis, leoniculis vel alicuius hystoria depictis [recte depictas] vel protractas. Item, habeat scuta colorata vel non colorata, alba, nigra, flosculis de flagella [recte glagello]74 vel aliis leoniculis depicta, rubeo vel cinoplo, viridi, vel auro, azuri. Item habeat scuta listata flosculis, avibus, bestiunculis, quaturnata, moncellata, lambata rosis.
72 Both Cambridge manuscripts (G & C 205/111, p. 262, and CCC 297, p. 320) have “habeat” here. 73 This phrase is murky. Of the two later versions of this text (G & C 205/111, p. 263, and CCC 297, p. 320), the former gives it as “cum articulis dimissis et latis,” while the latter has “cum arculis dimissis et latis.” “Arculis” (saddle-bows) fits the sense of this passage better than “articulis.” However, while “divisis” (separate?) seems awkward, “dimissis” seems worse than awkward here. 74 There is no ablative noun “flagella,” and both of the Cambridge manuscripts (G & C 205/111, p. 263, and CCC 297, p. 321) read “glagello” here. For its translation as fleur de lis, see the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “gladiolous,” 3.
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Pelliparius habeat pellicia, penulas, fururas ex pellibus agninis vel foleis [?recte follibus] ex griso, experiolis, sorellis; ex cuniculis, laironibus, edulline [sic]; ex pellibus ovinis, hispidis et pilosis; ex grossis vel minutis sive crispis; ex catis sive ex pellibus catenis, grossas [recte grossis] vel super rasas [recte rasis]. Item habeat penulas albas, nigras, et habeat urlas de sablino matrice, ex fibro, ex wlpecula [sic for vulpecula] vel roserella, vel ex lutro, et cetera. Lorimarius habeat lorenas, scilicet frena, cingula, cum duplici coreo. Item, sint lorene in freno, in pectorali et strepis sive scancilibus, quedam de minutis clavis, quedam de clavis latis, rotundis, cum scutis, scutellulis pendentibus ferreis vel cupreis deauratis, quedam cum campanellis vel anulis. Item intelligendum est de strepis et de pectoralibus. Strepas habeat latas sub pede ad opus militum, cum virga gracili ad opus monachi, et rotundas, strepas quadratas, strictas et latas secundum varietatem equorum et equietaturum. Item habeat calcaria ad opus militum de- [fol. 90v] aurata, vel calcaria cum virga gracili et rotunda vel quadrata.
Translation Of persons some are ecclesiastics and some are seculars, and of both the former and the latter some are superior, others inferior, some the lowest. The superiors are the lord pope, the archbishops, bishops, abbots, and priors. The inferiors are the archdeacons, deacons, officials, parsons, and vicars. The lowest are parish priests, summoners, and simple clerks. The superior seculars are emperors, kings, counts, dukes, and barons; the inferiors are justiciars, sheriffs, constables, foresters, verderers, knights, burgesses, and freeholders. The lowest are beadles, serfs, cobblers and all workmen (officiarii), either officers or servants (tam ministri sive ministrelli), urban or rural. If a superior person write to an inferior, the superior should be put first in the nominative case, the inferior put after in the dative case. If an inferior person write to a superior, the superior should be put first in the dative case, the inferior put after in the nominative case. If, however, an equal write to an equal, as a knight to a knight or a burgess to a burgess, either may be put before the other, but in order to obtain good will (causa benivolencie captande), in a letter of petition, he to whom it is written is generally put first in the dative case. In every petition made to a superior or an equal, the one being petitioned (petitus) should be designated in the plural [e.g., as vos instead of tu]. I propose to speak first of letters to creditors, because some creditors are urban, and some are rural. Urban [are] the vintner, draper (pannarius sive drapparius), fisherman (piscator) or fishmonger (piscarius), butcher, poulterer (auceps), baker, pasteler (pie-baker), flan-maker, goldsmith, girdler, glover, saddler, cordwainer (alutarius, cordevanarius, corvesarius), hosier (husuarius sive ocrearius), lorimer, skinner, and similar folk. And of each of these in his place I shall speak.
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The vintner should have wine of Anjou, Gascony, the Île-de-France, and Auvergne; sweet or rosé wine (vinum raspatum);75 wine flavored with zedoary and with saxifrage; piment and claré (red and white spiced wines); grape juice (mustum); perry; vinegar; cider; and mead (medum sive ydromellum). And let the vintner sell wine by measures (modios), by barrels or tuns, by pipes, by sesters, by the half-sester, by gallons, by pottles or flasks (half-gallons), by quarts or pints, that is, half-quarts. Again, let the vintner have in his cellar bottles (utres), casks, funnels (infusoria sive intonellaria), spigots or taps (clepsedres sive dusellos), costrels, troughs (alvealos), slides for lowering casks (pulanos), and an auger or gimlet or wimble ([terebellum] sive penetralium sive persorium). Also let him have cups of gold, or of maple or mazer (de murra vel de macera), and cups with lids. Let a draper have, in his seld or at fairs, cloths of various sorts, both cheap (de vili precio sive de vili foro) and expensive. Let him have English broadcloths, having a width of two ells, more or less, including the selvedges; heavier or thicker cloths for making a hood (capatium), or finer, lighter, dressier (?or better-quality: melius vestientes) cloths for making robes (suits of clothing). Let him have scarlet [that is] black, white, or dyed with green; black or sanguine burnet; burnet dyed violet, red, perse (dark blue), bluet (a shade of blue), wachet (wagetam: light blue),76 [or] plunket (plucatam: a light or grayish blue);77 black or white russet, and russet of Leicester or of Oxford. Let him have unshorn or shorn russet (grossum russetum vel minuetum),78 London burel or burel of Beauvais, russet imperial, blue imperial, white haberget of Stamford, russet haberget, [and] haberget dyed in green, brown, blue, black, or red. Let him have white, [black,] unshorn or shorn (grossum vel minuetum) cordium, and striped (radiatum) cordicium. And let him have gray cloth (grisetum) of Totnes [and] of Cornwall. Let a fisherman, who [fishes] with a hook, a net or a lance, or a fishmonger, who sells fish, have sea fish and freshwater fish, mudfish (limosos) or flatfish (platias), and whales (balenas sive cetefocas), sturgeons, congers, plaice, pike, lampreys, lamperns, mackerels, salmons, cockles (?or whelks), sprats, breams, rays (radeas), roach, whiting (merlingos), tench, haddock, eels,
75 See MED, s.v. “Raspise” (1440-75). Latham, however, defines vinum raspatum as “wine freshened after it has gone stale” (Revised Medieval Latin Word-List, s.v. “Raspatum,” c. 1210). 76 See MED, s.v. “Wachet.” 77 See MED, s.v. “Plunket.” 78 This text describes both russet cloth and cordium as “grossum vel minuetum,” and cat skins that are “grossas vel super rasas.” This suggests a contrast between cloth or skins that are shaggy or unshorn and those that are shorn. A similar contrast is drawn between sheepskins with long-haired fleece (“grossis”) and those with short or curly hair (“minutis sive crispis”), and between gloves that are “grossas” (heavy or rough) and “minutas” (fine or thin).
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gudgeons (gugiones, celluras [?recte siluros] sive minusas),79 loach, capitones (bullhead, miller’s thumb, or gurnard),80 and minnows (verrones). Let the butcher have salt meat and fresh, of cattle, goats, pigs, lambs, kids (edulinas), calves, or piglets; also let him have bacons, hams (reading pernas in place of perrias), or fore-quarters of pork (reading petasunculos instead of petafulsus).81 Item, let him have carcases of oxen, sheep, goats, or muttons. Item, let him have scorched and scalded bacons (bacones ustos, scaturizatos).82 Item, let him have salted or pickled pork. Item, let him have lard (lardum, saimum, unctum porcinum) and sheep’s tallow.83 Item, let him have the entrails of pigs, oxen or sheep, and the tripes of oxen or sheep. Item, let him have cowhides and sheepskins. Item, let him have axes with which to brain [oxen] and divide up the flesh of pigs, and knives (clunacula, a[r]tavos) with which to gut and skin pigs, sheep, and oxen. Let the poulterer have birds of the forests and fields and domestic birds, seabirds and riverbirds. Item, let him have herons (ardeas sive airones), storks (cigonios), partriches (perdices), quail (coturnices), woodcocks (castrimargios, wodecok), plovers (pluviarios), cranes (grues) or swans (cignos sive [olores]), mallards, aquatic birds (mergites), peacocks, domestic geese (anseres [for anderes], aucas domesticas) and others, namely, white geese, gray geese, goslings, capons, cocks, hens, chickens, pigeons, doves, and thrushes (malvicia). Item, he takes birds in lime or with snares (in visco vel tendiculis vel laqueis) or with a standing or hanging net, so that all birds [?of the forests] and fields, such as hawks, can be taken, [?and he also takes] other
79
See MED, s.v. “Menuse.” The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources defines “capito” as a “kind of fish,” and cites glossings as bullhead, “caboche,” and gurnard. Alexander Nequam (or Neckam) included the capito among a list of fish in De nominibus utensilium; one manuscript of 1250-1300 glosses this as “caboche” while two manuscripts of the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries gloss it, respectively, as “caboche vel gurnard” and as “caboge.” Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, 2: 66. See OED, s.vv. “bullhead” and “caboche,” for fifteenth- century references to capito as a “bulhede,” and to “caboche” as a fish (bullhead or miller’s thumb). The OED defines miller’s thumb as “[a]ny of various freshwater sculpins of the genus Cottus, esp. the European bullhead, C. gobio; (also) a marine sculpin (rare);” and identifies gurnards as marine fish of the genus Trigla or family Triglidae, which have a large, spiny head. 81 These last two terms may instead represent a flitch and a half-flitch of bacon: a fifteenth-century Latin-English word-list printed by Thomas Wright (Volume of Vocabularies 1: 242) includes “Hec perra, a flyk,” and “Hec petasiculus, half a flyk.” 82 See Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “Excaturizatio.” The hog carcases have been scorched or scalded to loosen the hair so that it can be scraped off. 83 For saimum cf. MED, s.v. “Seim(e).” 80
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small birds, such as those that live in eaves or shingles (ut domiciliarios sive scingudarios).84 Let the baker have leavened bread (panem azimum)85 and black bread (panem furvum); and wheaten, barley, rye and oat bread. Item, let him have fine white bread (placencia, libia, liba, infungia, panem album),86 sourdough bread (panem fermenteum),87 bolted or sieved [?flour] (panem [?recte florem] bultatum, cribratum, saclatum, sive temesatum), fine spice-bread (libia piperata) and cocket-bread.88 Item, let him have a bakehouse, oven (furnum sive clibanum), and dough-brake (confractorem).89 Item, let him have a bolting cloth or sieve (polentridium) [and] a molding board (rotabulum); item, sieved (c[rib]elatam) meal, wheat flour. Item, [let him have bread] cooked in an oven (in clibano vel in fornace) or in a pan (saritagine) or on a griddle (in cratela). Let the pasteler have pasties of meats and fish, well spiced. Item, let him have [pasties] of game (de ferina sive venacionibus) or of domestic meat, of game-birds or domestic birds (vel de feris vel de volucribus sive de volati-
84
This last sentence appears to be corrupt. Compare it with the fuller versions in the two Cambridge manuscripts, quoted in n.67 above. A vernacular gloss to Alexander Nequam’s De nominibus utensilium (in Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, 2: 84) translates domiciliarum as severunder; cf. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word-List, s.v. “severunda” (eaves or cornice), and Old French sevronde (eaves with downspouts). 85 Azimus was leaven; see Hunt’s glosses in Teaching and Learning Latin, 3: 17, 289; cf. Classical Latin acrozymus (“slightly leavened”). 86 Placenta were simnels (fine white rolls, twice-baked or perhaps boiled first and then baked, like modern bagels) and libum or liba was wastel bread (the finest white bread). See Hunt’s glosses for liba, -um; placenta(s), -e(s), -um (Teaching and Learning Latin, 3: 92, 126, 341, 363); and MED, s.vv. “Simenel” and “Wastel,”the latter quoting John Mirfield’s Sinonoma Bartholomei (ante1400): “Placenta est panis factus de pasca [?read: pasta] azima, i. wastel.” A Latin word-list with interlineal English glosses in British Library, MS Lansdowne 560, fol. 47r-v (late fourteenth-early fifteenth century) also glosses libum as wastel. Infungia was unleavened bread, here apparently also made from fine white flour. See Holmes, Daily Living in the Twelfth Century, 284, n.48, and Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “Infungia,” where it is defined as cocket bread (described by Adam of Petit-Pont in De utensilibus as a sourdough bread, made without leaven). 87 Cf. MED, s.vv. “Ferment” and “Sour-dough.” 88 See n.86, above; cf. MED, s.v. “Coket” (n.2): bread made of fine flour, second only to wastel bread. 89 CCC 297, p. 319, elaborates on this term: “confractoreum, sive braccam, sive pincam, scilicet brake.” A dough-brake was a mechanical device used by bakers for kneading dough. See OED, s.v. “brake” (n.3), which quotes the Promptorium Parvulorum (c. 1440): “Bray or brakene, baxteris instrument, pinsa.” Latham’s Revised Medieval Latin Word-List, s.v. “pinsa,” took this instead to mean a kneading trough or board.
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libus); of game, that is, of the hind (cerve, vel de cerva: female red deer), roe (caprea: female roe deer) or doe (dama: female fallow deer); of the fat flesh of the hare (leporis lardo); of sea birds, forest birds or domestic birds, which are enumerated above. On the other hand, let the flan-maker have flans (opacos, artocopos, flaones) made of eggs, bread and cheese. Let the waferer have wafers or little cakes (wafras vel lagana) cooked in irons or ovens.90 Let the goldsmith have stock (opus) both ductile (hammered) and fusile (molten or cast), for he works in metals and in stones. Metal is ductile or fusile, but stone is only carvable or engravable (scriptilis). At times he works in gold, silver, [or] copper, [or ornaments: vel trifurat] in tin [or] brass. Item, let him have hollow and solid work, smooth (planum vel planatum) or engraved (inpressum vel insculptum). Item, let him have chalices (calices), plate, [pots (ollas)], flagons (iustas), crowns, basins, cruets for consecrated oil (ampollas, fioles), reliquaries (filatria), crosses of gold or silver, or of wood covered with thin sheets or plates of gold or silver; a candelabrum; [and] spoons. Item, let him have cups of mazer with a foot of gold or silver, and bound above with gold or silver. Item, let him have cups with covers and plain cups. Item, let him have bowls (crateres vel crateras) with decorations (trifuris), either smooth or engraved; dishes and platters (scutellas, parapsides);91 saucers and salt-cellars. Item, let him make rings, brooches, pendants (?or necklaces, monilia), chains, and girdle-studs (membra zonarum). Item, let him have little bellows (folliculos), tongs, an anvil (reading incudem in place of inclinum), hammers and everything for cleansing metal, and a grindstone (or whetstone: molam) for putting a sharp edge onto iron, and a hare’s foot and a leather apron (reading corium gremiale for corte) for collecting and wiping up (extergenda, instead of expurgendum) grains (grana, instead of gramina) of metals. Let him also have various small vessels, gold fringe (aurifragium, orphrey), silver wire, [and] a painted tray for displaying the choicest items (tabellam oblitam ad flosculos protrahendos). Let the cutler make various knives, huntsmen’s daggers,92 the knives of scribes (i.e., penknives) or of those who chip or chop [food or wood?] (dola90
Cf. the glosses in Hunt (3: 88) that translate lagana or laganum as cake, crampecake, pannecake, turtel, etc. The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources defines “laganum” as “unleavened cake cooked in oil, pancake, fritter.” 91 Scutella (French esquele) meant dish or bowl, while parapsides were “doublers” (dishes or plates) or platters. See the glosses for parapsides, parapsis and scutella(s) in Hunt, 2: 118, 146-7; see also Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “Paropsis,” and MED, s.vv. “Dish,” “Doubler,” “Plater,” “Scutel.” Cf. the word-lists in English Glosses from British Library Additional Manuscript 37075, ed. Ross and Brooks, fol. 322b (“scutella, plater/ periapsis, dubler”); British Library, MS Lansdowne 560, fol. 47r (“parapcid’ dobler”); and British Library, MS Royal 17 A. III, fol. 31v (“haec scutella a plater/haec parapsis idem”). 92 On clunacula (daggers), see Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, 2: 44 and n.62.
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torum).93 Let him have table knives, or knives for hanging at the girdle, and plain knives. Item, let him make razors, scissors (forfices), shears, etc. Let the girdler have girdles of silk, linen, or leather, namely, black, red, or white, with iron or copper studs (membris). Item, let him have smooth or barred or studded girdles, with round or square studs (planas zonas vel barratas sive membratas, membris rotundis vel quadratis). Let the glover have heavy or rough (grossas) gloves, suitable for harvesters and dykers; fine or thin ones (minutas) for the use of those who do not labor at manual, servile work, pulling or gathering teasels or thistles (cardanos, instead of cardones) and thorns. Item, let him have lined and unlined gloves, shaggy (pilosas) or smooth (planas). Let him have large, lined gloves for the use of the falconer. Item, [let him have] woolen gloves, and seamless, moreover, and entirely knitted (et inconsutiles desuper et totum contextas). Let the cordwainer have true tawed leather of goatskins [and] sheepskins. Let him have boots (estivalia, crepidas, sive botas), roomy [and] padded with felt (largas, tentone munitas) for the use of men, or tight (stric[t]as) for the use of women. Item, let him have pointed (?or pricked) shoes (sotulares p[i]catos) or shoes laced up the middle with thongs (sotulares cum medullis corrigiis laqueatos). Item, let him have shoes with strapped (?or drawstring) collars (colariis ligulis) for the use of knights.94 The hosier (or leggings-maker, husurarius) and cobbler (sutor) work in cowhides. Let the cobbler make leggings (ocreas sive husas) and shoes equally varied and of as many fashions as the cordwainer, but the hosier shall only make leggings and not shoes. Let the saddler have diverse and various saddles: for the use of the monk, with the separate and broad saddle-bows (cum articulis [recte arculis] divisis et latis) uncolored; tooled (insculptas) for the use of knights, of the lady, the squire, the parson and the priest; for horse, palfrey, [and] sumpter. Item, let him have girths (singulas) and saddles, red (vermiculatas), 93 Chipping knives were used to chip or pare burnt crusts from loaves; chopping and paring knives would also have been useful in various types of food preparation. Cf. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word-List, s.v. “Dol/atura;”MED, s.v. “Chippen” v.(1). 94 In the fourteenth century, at least, “piked” shoes were those with long, pointed toes or “peaks.” However, picare could also mean “to prick” (cf. modern French piquer and piqûre), suggesting shoes with pricked or openwork ornamentation. See MED, s.v. “Pike” 5(a); Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List, s.v. “Pica” (4). For a survey of medieval shoes and footed hose, shoemaking, and cobbling in London, see Francis Grew and Margrethe de Neergaard, Medieval Finds from Excavations in London, 2: Shoes and Pattens (London: The Stationery Office, 1988, especially 2-3, 9-21, 44-59, 79-81, 113-6, 119-22. Pages 16-20 include drawings and photographs of early-mid thirteenth-century shoes and boots with side-lacing, drawstring-lacing, and openwork, and with rounded and pointed toes.
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white, or colored with gold or red (sinoplo), painted or drawn with little flowers, lioncels (leoniculis: little lions, not lion cubs), or with a device of some kind (vel alicuius hystoria). Item, let him have shields, painted or unpainted, white [or] black, painted with little fleurs de lis (flosculis de glagello) or more lioncels in red (rubeo vel cinoplo), green, gold, [or] azure. Item, let him have shields bordered (listata) with little flowers, birds, [or] tiny beasts; quartered (quaturnata); strewn (moncellata: literally, “heaped”) [or] decorated (lambata) with roses.95 Let the skinner have pilches [and] fur linings (pellicia, penulas, fururas) of lambskins, of the bellies (?foleis; recte follibus) from the gray [winter coat of] squirrels (de griso, experiolis, sorellis),96 of coneys,97 of dormice or martens (laironibus),98 of kid (edulline),99 of sheepskins, rough and hairy, from longhaired or short-haired or curly-haired [sheep], of catskins (ex catis sive ex pellibus catenis), shaggy or shorn (grossas vel super rasas). Item, let him have fur linings, white [and] black, and let him have revers of sable-belly (urlas de sablino matrice), of beaver (ex fibro), of the little fox or weasel (roserella), or of otter (lutro), etc. Let the lorimer have items made of straps (lorenas), namely bridles, and girths with a leather lining. Item, let there be straps for the bridle, the poitrel (pectorali) and the stirrups (strepis sive scancilibus), some with narrow bands, some with broad bands, with round dangling shields (scutis, scutellulis) of gilded iron or copper; some with little bells or rings. Item, one should know about stirrups and poitrels. Let him have stirrups that are broad under the foot for the use of knights; with a slim stirrup-iron (?virga gracili) for the use of the monk; and round stirrups, square stirrups, narrow and broad ones, according to the variety of horses and riders. Item, let him
95
On the terminology of heraldry in this period, see Gerard J. Brault, Early Blazon: Heraldic Terminology in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries with Special Reference to Arthurian Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). I am grateful to David Crouch for this reference. 96 According to Veale (English Fur Trade, 219, s.vv. “Escureus” and “Gris,” 223-4, 228), medieval furriers distinguished between gris, which was the finequality gray winter back of red squirrels from the coldest parts of Northern and Central Europe, and variants of the Latin word sciurus (squirrel), which “were applied to squirrel skins from parts of Southern and Central Europe, usually of little value to the skinner.” Cf. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin WordList, s.vv. “Experiolus,” “Griseum,” “Scurellus.” 97 The coney (rabbit) skins may have been imported, since rabbits were not introduced into the English mainland until the early thirteenth century (ante1235), around the time of the composition of this treatise. Cf. Veale, English Fur Trade, 209-14. 98 Cf. Veale, English Fur Trade, 220, s.v. “Leron”; Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “Laëro.” 99 Cf. Classical Latin haedulus, a little kid.
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have gilded spurs for the use of knights, or spurs with a slender shank (virga), both round and square.
APPENDIX III Notes on how to write and reply to a letter of request, together with ten sample letters, from British Library, Additional MS 8167, fols. 97r-98v (discussed in the introduction to Appendix II, above). The punctuation, capitalization, and use of “u” and “v” have been modernized; expanded abbreviations are shown in italics.
fol. 97r (mid-page)
(1) An earl of Gloucester orders wine and ale Precepciones et proibiciones sic debent fieri. Primo debet preponi salutacio, secundo [expunged by underscore: narracio] precepcio vel proibicio, tercio narracio, quarto conclusio, hoc modo. A. Comes glovernie C. fideli suo salutem. Precipio tibi ut visis literis istis omni occasione et dilacione postpositis mihi mitti facias per latorem presencium duos cados vini albi et duas floscas vini castanei et unum doleum servisie defecate. Sciturus quod ego et commitissa mea fleubotomati sumus apud .N. Tantum ergo facias ne nos in iram commoveas propter tuam negligenciam. Vale. (1) Translation Orders and refusals ought to be done thus. First should come the greeting; secondly, the order or refusal; thirdly, the explanation; fourthly, the conclusion, in this manner. A., Earl of Gloucester, to his faithful C. [perhaps A.’s household steward], greetings. I order you that, when you have seen these letters, having put aside every argument (occasione) and delay, you have sent to me by the bearer of these presents two barrels of white wine and two flasks of chestnut wine and one tun of filtered ale. You shall know that I and my countess are having our blood let at N. Therefore may you act in such a way that you do not move us to anger by your negligence. Farewell.
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(2) An earl orders his vintner, to whom he is in debt, to send him some wine Comes mandat creditori suo ut mittat sibi vinum. A. comes Glovernie dilecto sibi A. vinetario de C. salutem et dileccionem. Quum quicquid vobis de vino credito [corrected in MS from creditorio] multociens debuimus, ad diem vestrum semper plenarie fol. 97v persolvemus, et nichil est in re- [fol. 97v] ragio, audacius in hoc stanti negocio confugimus attencius rogantes quatinus v. dolea vini, scilicet duo gasconiensis et tria andegavense [recte andegavensis], quodlibet ad precium .xx. solidorum usque ad Pasca floridum nobis acomodetis. Scituri quod denarios vestros ad diem nominatum omni occasione [in MS, “aiccasione”] et dilacione remota persolvemus. Tantum ergo facientes [?recte faciatis] ut vobis ad gratiarum teneamur acciones. Valete.
(2) Translation An earl orders his creditor to send him some wine A., earl of Gloucester, to his beloved A., vintner of C., greetings and love. Whereas we have often owed you something for wine on credit, we have always paid in full on your day, and nothing is in arrears, the more boldly in this present business we have turned to you, anxiously asking that you accommodate us with five tuns of wine, namely, two of Gascon and three of Angevin, at a price of 20s apiece, until Palm Sunday. You will know that we shall pay your money on the day named without any argument or delay; therefore, may you act only in such a manner that we shall be bound to you in gratitude. Farewell. (3) Response to the preceding letter Responsio ad literas predictas. Dileccio domino suo et amico W. Comiti de S., suus A. vinetarius salutem. Litera [recte literas] vestras nuper accepi petitorias quatinus .v. dolea vini gasconensi [recte gasconiensis] et tria andegavense [recte andegavensis], quodlibet ad precium .xx. solidorum, usque ad pasca floridum vobis acomodarem. Quum quicquid mihi debuistis optime persoluistis precibus vestris ad presens adquiesco et .v. dolea vero
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petistis vobis acomodo, de vobis confidens quod ad diem nominatum iuxta consuetudinem vestram mihi debitum meum persolvetis [corrected in MS from persolvistis]. (3) Translation Response to the abovesaid letter To his beloved lord and friend, W., Earl of S., A. his vintner sends greetings. I have lately received your letters asking that I accommodate you with five tuns of Gascon wine and three of Angevin, at a price of 20s. each, until Pasca Floridum (Palm Sunday). Since whatever you have owed me you have paid in the best manner, I agree to your present request and shall accommodate you with the five tuns that you have sought, confident of you that on the day named, according to your custom, you will pay your debt to me in full. (4) How the vintner should respond if the earl does not repay his debts Si non soluit bene quod debuit tunc dicat sic Tantum de libertate vestra confidens presumens preces vestras ad effectum mancipare, vobis .v. dolea vini petita acomodo, rogans attencius quatinus de antiquo debito quod super est in reragio pariter cum hoc novo debito ad dictum diem mihi persolvatis. Valete. (4) Translation If he has not paid well what he has owed, then let him say thus Trusting only in your generosity, being so bold as to put your wishes in effect, I shall accommodate you with the five tuns of wine you requested, beseeching you anxiously that you pay me in full your old debt, which is in arrears, equally with this new debt, on the said day. Farewell. (5) An earl sends an order to his draper, to whom he is in debt Comes mandat pannario creditori suo B. comes glovernie dilecto sibi A. pannario London’ salutem et dileccionis affectum. Quamvis merita nostra non exigant (vel non pre-
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cesserint) tamen de libertate vestra confidimus (ad vos in hoc instanti negocio confugimus), rogans attencius quatinus .xx. ulnas de scarleta rubea et totidem de perso et totidem de minueto ad rationabile forum vel precium prout sustinere poteritis usque ad clausum pasca, absque pignore si vobis placuerit, mihi acomodetis (vel, super .x. anulos aureos et .x. ciphos argenteos quos vobis transmittimus). Sciatis enim pro vero quod ad diem prefixum, omni occasione remota, vobis bene persolvemus. Tantum ergo faciatis ut vobis tanquam familiari et creditori nostro grates et honores cum denariis vestris referamus. Valete. (5) Translation An earl sends an order to his draper, to whom he is in debt B., Earl of Gloucester, to his beloved A., draper of London, greetings and love. Although our merits are not compelling (or, have not been outstanding), nevertheless we have relied on your generosity ([or,] we have turned to you in this present business), asking anxiously that you accommodate me with 20 ells of red scarlet, and the same of perse (dark blue) [scarlet], and the same of shorn (minueto) [scarlet], at the most reasonable cost or price that you can manage, until the Sunday after Easter, without a pledge, if you please (or, upon the ten gold rings and ten silver cups that we send you). For you know it for a fact that we shall pay you well on the appointed day, without any delay. Therefore, may you act only in such a manner that we shall return our thanks and respect to you, as our friend as much as our creditor, along with your money. Farewell. (6) An earl sends an order to his skinner, to whom he is in debt Comes mandat creditori suo pellipario fol. 98r Comes dilecto sibi H. pellipario salutem. et amoris integritatem. Penulis et fururis ad hoc instans pasca quamplurimum indigeo sed denarios ad illas comparandas non habeo. Quare vos imploro quatinus .xx. penulas de griso et totidem ex variis, de agnelino minuto et crispo, de propria selda vestra mihi acomodetis vel aliunde, ad credenciam. Habere faciatis de propriis, [?vel,] ratum habentes de alienis manibus capientes et denarios vestros ad diem prenominatum omni occasione remota de manibus meis vel R. senescalli mei recipietis. Valete.
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(6) Translation An earl sends an order to his skinner, to whom he is in debt The Earl to his beloved skinner H., greetings and the fullest of love. I am sorely lacking in fur linings at this present Easter, but I do not have the money to pay for them. Wherefore I implore you that you accommodate me with 20 linings of gris, and the same of vair [and] of lambskin with fine and curly [fleece], from your own seld or from elsewhere, on credit (ad credenciam). Let you arrange to have [them] from your own stock (de propriis), [?or], having this authorization (?habentes ratum), taking [them] from the hands of others, and you will receive your money on the aforesaid day, without any dispute, from my own hands or those of R., my steward. Farewell. (7) The manner in which one should write a positive or negative response to a request In literis responsalibus ad peticionem notandam quod aud [sic] comodat aud [sic] expresse negat aud [sic] se excusat. In literis autem talibus visi tres partes ad minus sunt. Primo debet salutare respondens; secundo ostendere quid petitum sit; tercio qualiter velit parere vel qualiter debeat negare vel excusare; quarto si placet poterit concludere. Item qui wlt [sic, for vult] parere [corrected in MS from paretre] petitis, potest ostendere per vero vel per aud [sic] suam impotenciam excusare. Inde per quare vel per quapropter potest procedere ad excusacionem. (7) Translation In letters of response to a request, note that either one agrees or expressly denies or excuses oneself. Moreover, in such letters there are at least three parts. Firstly, the respondent should send greetings; secondly, he should describe what is sought; thirdly, he should [say] in what way he wishes to agree, or for what reason he must refuse or excuse [himself]; fourthly, if he pleases, he can conclude. Item, he who wishes to agree to requests can show [this] by “vero,” or excuse his inability [to agree] by “aud” [sic]. Then, by “quare” or “quapropter” he can proceed to his excuse.
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(8) Letter of refusal from a skinner ruined by fire Dilecto amico et cetera. Literas vestras nuper accepi in quibus me petistis ut ego vobis penulas et fururas perquirerem, quod libenter fecissem, sed ignis nuper superveniens [corrected in MS. from superveniens nuper] totam pecuniam meam redegit in cinerem. Unde vobis mittere non potui quod non habui nec creditores inveni qui aliquid mihi crederent post incendium. Dubitaverunt enim perdere totum quod mihi acomodarent. Precor igitur ne moleste feratis quod petita vobis non misi cum sciatis causam inpedimenti [sic]. Valete. (8) Translation To my beloved friend, etc. I have lately received your letter in which you requested that I purchase for you fur linings (penulas et fururas), which I would freely have done, had not a fire recently occurring reduced my wealth to ashes. Wherefore I could not send you that which I did not have, nor have I found creditors who would lend me anything after the fire, for they feared to lose everything that they lent me. I pray, therefore, that you do not take it amiss that I have not sent what you requested, since you know the cause of the impediment. Farewell. (9) Another letter of the same type Adhuc de huiusmodi literis dicemus A. B. salutem. Obsequium aliud exigit, et subtraccio exigit subtraccionem. Pecii nuper ut mihi succureres de tignis et trabibus quorum copia penes te est. Tu autem surdas aures peticioni mee prebuisti et ideo non mireris [corrected in MS from mirereis] si preces tuas presentes audire recusem. Nolo enim ([?vel] velle debeo) tibi de meo succurere, quoniam [?quando] de rebus vestris unum pecii dedignatus fuisti mihi subvenire. Et ideo ut de cetero amicum habeas, amicum [recte amicus] inveniaris. Valete. (9) Translation Again we speak of letters of the same type A. to B., greetings. One consent demands another, and a refusal demands a refusal. Lately I asked you to help me out with some lumber and beams, of which you have plenty at your place. But
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you turned deaf ears to my petition, and therefore you will not wonder if I refuse to hear your own present prayers. For I do not wish ([or,] ought I to wish) to aid you from my [stock] (de meo), since, [?when] I sought one thing of yours, you disdained to come to my aid. And so, henceforward, if you want to have a friend, you will have to be found [to be] a friend. Farewell. (10) An earl sends an order to his client (member of his affinity) Comes clienti suo precipit sic D. comes cestrie dilecto et fideli suo A. salutem. De fidelitate tua fol. 98v quamplurimum confisi, tibi mandantes (precipimus), preces preceptis adiungentes, ut pro amore nostro et fide quam nobis debes .C. solidos facias nos habere ad unum equum emendum. Sciturus quod palefridus noster mortuus est et non habemus equum cui possimus confidere. Quare tantum facias ne negocium nostrum admittatur pro defectu equitature. Vale [?or Valete]. (10) Translation An earl sends an order to his client, thus D., Earl of Chester, to his beloved and faithful A., greetings. I have put my highest trust in your loyalty, ordering you ([or,] we have commanded), adding prayers to commands, that, for the sake of our love and the faith that you owe us, you provide us with 100 shillings to buy a horse. You shall know that our palfrey is dead, and we do not have a horse in which we can trust. Wherefore may you act in such a way that our business be not hindered for lack of a horse. Farewell. (11) An earl orders his knights to equip with horses and arms Comes militibus ut muniantur equis et armis R. Comes Cestrie omnibus militibus suis salutem. De dileccione vestra quamplurimum confisi, vobis mandantes (precipimus; attentissime petimus) quatinus pro amore nostro parati sitis cum equis et armis in die tali coram nobis ubicumque fuerimus. Sciturus [recte scituri] quod dominus Rex nos sicut alios fecit summoniri et cum eo transfretaremus cum totis viribus nostris sicut amorem suum desi-
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deramus. Quare tantum faciatis ut domino regi placere poterimus et fideliter servire in necessitatibus [corrected in MS. from necessitabtibus]. Valete. (11) Translation An earl orders his knights to equip with horses and arms R., Earl of Chester, to all his knights, greetings. I have put my highest trust in your love, ordering you ([or,] we have ordered, we have most anxiously besought) that, for the sake of our love, you be prepared with horses and arms on such a day before us wherever we shall be. You shall know that the lord king has caused us, like others, to be summoned to take ship with him with all our men, as we desired his love. Wherefore may you act in such a way that we shall be able to please the king and faithfully serve him in his necessities. Farewell.
MOVABLE/IMMOVABLE, WHAT’S IN A NAME?—THE CASE OF LATE MEDIEVAL GHENT Martha Howell
The terms “movable” and “immovable” wealth, categories bequeathed to Europeans by Roman law, arrived in the North of the continent during the high Middle Ages where they conveniently served to distinguish assets that were, quite literally, “immovable” from those that were not. The words had more than descriptive value, however, for they were quickly conflated with terms that had long been used in the region to separate patrimonial from personal property. The categories did not, however, precisely overlap, and the confusion that resulted produced a messy legal record. Throughout the late Middle Ages, authorities frequently were called upon to resolve disputes about the movable or immovable status of particular goods or about their patrimonial status, questions which arose most often during commercial dealings, in marriage, and at death—all situations in which property was being transferred. Nowhere was the record messier than in cities, for in these commercial centers property was regularly in circulation. The Flemish city of Ghent, one of northern Europe’s most important commercial and industrial centers of the late Middle Ages, has preserved a rich collection of documents tracing this story. Its twists and turns reveal a great deal about how uncomfortably and incompletely the terms of market exchange took form in Europe, even among people like Gentenaren who lived almost entirely by trade. It also helps expose what is too often suppressed in our histories of the western market economy: the hard political, social and cultural work that went into its making and the unpredictability of its final shape.
Movables and Immovables in Northern European Society and Law Although the terms “movables” and “immovables” (in Latin, mobilia and immobilia) were imports, northern Europeans of the Middle
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Ages had no difficulty defining an immovable. For them, any good given that label was land itself or it was so bound to land as to be inseparable from it. Land is, of course, quite literally immovable, for unlike a dress, chest, or plow, land cannot be transported, hidden, or misplaced. It does not depreciate in the normal sense of the term.1 Land’s importance in the medieval economy heightened its assumed immobility. The medieval economy was an agrarian economy; even in the very latest years of the Middle Ages some 85 per cent of what we would called Gross National Product was composed of agricultural goods. Land’s perpetual productivity sealed its status as the premier—virtually the sole—immovable, for that quality made it the fundament of the social order. Thanks to land’s relatively stable value through time, rights to land defined both the aristocracy who controlled it and the peasants who worked it, providing each a social identity and assuring class continuity from generation to generation. In contrast, movables were an analytically distinct category of property. Clothing, jewels, foodstuffs, furniture, coin, and equipment were, after all, literally movable. Even grain or animals, which were closely tied to the land, were also separable from it, and as such they were readily labeled “movable.” In addition, movables did not hold value as land did, for they were subject to depreciation, destruction, theft, or just plain loss, as land never was. Easily understood in ordinary discourse, the distinction between “movable” and “immovable” wealth was also easily incorporated into northern property law. Throughout much of northern Europe, each of the many versions of customary law made a distinction between 1 The category of immovables was, in law, capacious, but land was the fundament. Jean Brissaud, A History of French Private Law, trans. of 2nd Fr. ed. (Boston: Little & Brown, 1912), provides a summary of the types of property included in the category in the Middle Ages: the land and everything which is an integral part of the soil, buildings, crops growing on branches or roots; the movables which adhere to the immovables in the quality of accessories or appendages of the latter (but only on principle, if there was a physical connection); rights over the land which are like the ownership because of their duration (servitude, quit-rent, and rents) and rights which, according to the feudal conception, were connected with the land itself (right of administering justice or tolls, for example); rights like established rents and salable offices which had movables as their object but which were immovable or feudal in their origin (270-2). On the immovability of land, also see Philippe Godding, Le droit privé dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux du 12e au 18e siècle, 2d ed. (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1987), 142.
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the two kinds of property and the rights attaching to them. That difference did not, however, derive directly from their movable status. Instead, the Latin terms “movables” and “immovables,” along with their equivalents in French, Dutch, or German (meubles/ immeubles in French, meublen/immeublen in Dutch, and bewegliche Güter/unbewegliche Güter in German) were conflated with concepts deeply rooted in these cultures and expressed in a vocabulary that long predated the imported Latin terms. In French speaking regions, people traditionally spoke of cateux and heritages (héritages in modern French), not meubles or immeubles. In Dutch speaking regions people spoke of cateylen and erve, and in German-speaking regions of Fahrnis and Erbgüter.2 There are no precise equivalents to these terms in medieval English law, but the English words “chattels” on the one hand, and “patrimony” on the other capture their sense, for cateux, catheylen, and Fahrnis were what we think of as chattels or personal, private property while heritage, erve, and Erbgüter were, in fact, treated as patrimony. The distinction drawn in northern property law between chattels and patrimony was not, however, the same as the common-sense 2 For a fuller discussion, see Godding, Le droit privé, esp. 142; and Dirk Hierbaut, Over lenen en families: een studie over the vroegste geschiedenis van het zakelijk leenrecht in het graafschap Vlaanderen (ca. 1000-1350) (Brussels: Palais der Academiën, 2000). As Hierbaut explains, the distinction between “movable” and “immovable” does not, in fact, perfectly accord with customary law’s distinction between cateyl and erve: “an erve is a good that is both permanently existing and productive ... [but] an important difference between Roman and customary law is...that the distinction movable-immovable in Roman law has relevance only with respect to tangible (corporeal or material [“lichamelijke”]) property. For customary law it makes no difference whether a good is tangible (“lichamelijk”) or not. So long as a good has permanent existence and is productive, it is erve and thus usually immovable. The terms movable and immovable in the acts of practices of the thirteenth century thus have no sense in Roman law. They are only substitutes for the concepts of cateyl and erve” (22-3). Anne-Marie Patault, Introduction historique au droit des biens (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989) also has a useful discussion of the way these terms were transferred from Roman law to customary in the French-speaking regions: “Au haut Moyen Âge, les mots proprietas, dominium sont toujours utilisés par des scribes qui reproduisent méchaniquement un vocabulaire romain desséché; nombreux sont les texts qui mentionnent ‘la propriété’ mais dés le XIIIe siècle les juristes romanisants ... généralisont les termes romains, proprietas, dominium, pour désigner une technique polymorphe d’appropriation qui n’a aucun point commun avec la propriété romaine, si ce n’est le nom” (19).
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notion of the difference between a movable good and an immovable. The key distinction in customary law was between goods that produced income (heritages, erve, or Erbgüter) and those that were income (cateux, cateylen, or Fahrnis). Goods that produced income were thought to have perpetual lives, yielding fruit or income from one generation to the next; in contrast, the fruit or income of these properties had no productive capacity. In his famous customal of the late thirteenth century, Beaumanoir perfectly expressed this logic. “Héritages” were goods that “ne peuvent être mus,” that produced revenues that “valent par années,” and that were perpetual because an “héritage ne peut faillir.”3 According to the logic of these northern European customs, a good with perpetual productive capacity was not subject to individual ownership, not fully available to a single person during his or her lifetime precisely because its productive life far exceeded that of any individual. It was thus intended to serve generations, not individuals. Any possessor of such a property, even someone holding the property as allodium (that is, independently of a lord or lessor), was nothing more than a possessor, and as such always had to take account of the interests of relatives by blood or marriage, those born or not-yet-born.4 Such assets were patrimony, not “property” in the sense we understand it. In contrast, goods that were deemed to be cateux, cateylen, or Fahrnis were under the 3
Philippe de Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, ed. Amédée Salmon, 2 vols. (1899-1900; reprint Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1970), nos. 672-8; cited in P. Ourliac and J. L. Gazzangia, Histoire du droit privé francais de l’an mil au code civil (Paris: A. Michel, 1985), 233. 4 On this point, see Hierbaut, Over lenen en families, 23, and Patault, Droit des biens, 19: “Mais le mot désigne alors non plus la maîtrise corporelle de la matière, mais seulement la jouissance de ses utilités. Il n’évoque plus l’orgueilleuse puissance solitaire du propriétaire romain, étrangère aux rapports juridiques entre les hommes. Il est seulement maîtrise partiaire enserrée dans la solidarité des rapports avec les autres et légitimée par le consensus du groupe. La ‘propriété’ n’est plus la souveraineté, elle est seulement, et pragmatiquement, la possibilité légitime de tirer un profit de la terre. Elle ne se confond plus avec la matiére, elle n’est que l’exploitation de la matiére. La pratique l’appelle ‘saisine,’ mais dés le XIIIe siècle les jurists romanisants effaceront ce terme du vocabulaire de la propriété et généraliseront les termes romains, proprietas, dominium, pour désigner une technique polymorphe d’appropriation qui n’a aucun point commun avec la propriété romaine, si ce n’est le nom” (19). Also see Philippe Godding, Le droit privé dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux du 12e au 18e siècle, 2nd ed. (Bruxelles: Palais des Académies, 1991), esp. sections 190-2: 141-3.
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individual possessor’s full control.5 They followed no necessary route of transmission and were thought to change ownership simply with their physical transfer from one holder to another. Although the movable/immovable distinction could not, then, be neatly equated with the chattel/patrimony distinction, the two sets of terms were treated as rough equivalents for much of the late Middle Ages. The conflation functioned so well because land, as both the premier immovable and the principal patrimonial asset in the medieval economy, almost perfectly served as the middle term linking patrimony to immobility. To be sure, there were occasions when the equation broke down. Buildings, mills, granaries, crops, fish—all such goods could arguably be considered immovable, as integral parts of the land, or they could with equal justice be called movable, as items separable from the land. Each region, each set of customs, resolved these issues on an ad hoc basis, and, inevitably, the result was diversity.6 Other goods that bore no “immovable” qualities whatsoever might nevertheless have patrimonial uses. Jewels, for example, were hoarded from one generation to the next and efficiently served to store wealth and preserve status across time. Were they not then “patrimonial” in some sense? As we shall see, these confusions were one of the major sources of instabilities in the legal records that survive from the age, for disputes about such matters regularly drove people to court or forced judicial authorities to issue clarifications about definition and categorization. In cities, such problems of definition became acute, for there land played so a minor role in economic and social life that it could not provide the necessary fundament to the immovable/ patrimonial equation. Rather, movables were the principal source of wealth in urban economies, and they changed hands rapidly in these commercial societies. The imported luxuries that flooded aristocratic Europe after the Crusades had begun were the first to
5 Patault, Droit des biens, provides a full discussion of this logic. As she explains, “La circulation est au meuble ce que la productivité est à la ‘l’immeuble’: le fondament de son utilité sociale” (291). As a result, “depuis le Moyen Age jusqu’à la Révolution, le meuble a été la seule veritable assise de la liberté de disposition” (283). On this see in addition Beaumanior, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, no. 622. 6 See, for these and other examples from the southern Low Countries, Godding, Le droit privé, 2nd ed., section 195: 145. For Germany, see Hans Planitz, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte (Graz-Köln: Böhlau, 1971).
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disrupt medieval Europeans’ easy assumption that “real” wealth was the same as land. Then, and of more profound importance for city people, came the raw materials, manufacturing equipment, and inventories that constituted the productive basis of urban economies. Along with all of these movables arrived financial paper of all kinds, land rents that had been generated by loans, and eventually even the bureaucratic offices that sovereigns handed out to the hordes of eager bidders of early modern Europe, all of which would sit very uneasily on the “movable/immovable = chattel/patrimony” equation. The value of all such goods, although relatively small in the context of the entire European economy, dominated the urban. Although all historians of the northern city have energetically taken account of these economic developments and their effects on political, social and cultural life, only legal historians have fully acknowledged that such a fundamental socioeconomic transformation could have occurred only with a comparable upheaval in property law. Being regularly confronted with the unstable and complex meanings attaching to the categories “movable” and “immovable” in law, they have often commented that property law was in motion in this age, and many of them have gone further, sensing the socioeconomic importance of this story and implicitly calling upon their colleagues to pursue it. In particular, they have pointed out that the moments of greatest tension—and hence of instability in law—occurred at marriage and death, for these were moments of massive property transfers.7 As we shall see, in most customary legal regimes of the North, the use to which movables and immovables could be put was determined by their relationship not just to chattels and patrimony but also, via chattels and patrimony, to the marital property fund. That fund was made of two categories of property. The first was jointly owned by husband and wife together; the second was explicitly reserved for the “line,” that is, for children born of the marriage or, in their absence, collateral or ascendant lineal kin. In Ghent, where this paper focuses, goods considered joint were called “partible” (deelbar) because, being joint to husband and wife, they were equally divisible between them at death. Thus, the surviving spouse got one-half of all partible goods and the heirs of the 7
See in particular Godding, Le doit privé, 142-3.
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deceased got the other half. The lineal goods of the deceased, in contrast, went entirely to heirs.8 Thus, as we shall see, the struggles regarding the definition of movable and immovable and their relationship to chattels and patrimony were, in Ghent, waged in terms of the partible/impartible divide. In the end, we shall also see, the terms survived—both those indigenous to the North and the imported Latin words, but their meanings and relationships in law changed. By the dawn of the early modern period, an immovable good would no longer necessarily be patrimonial; a movable might acquire that status; a good once labeled movable might at another moment in its economic life be labeled immovable. In this way, Gentenaren took a giant step towards the “commodification of all” that is the tendency of what we call capitalism but at the same time, they learned new ways to resist commodification. To accomplish these apparently incommensurate ends, Gentenaren had to rewrite property law so as to free their assets to the market but at the same time select some of them for the benefit of the family and its descendents. By tracing their tortured route, we can learn a lot about their understanding of property, their sense of the link between property and social identity, and their commitment to values beyond those of the market. In the process, we are granted a rare look at the birth pangs of what we call the market society.
Tracking Movables in Ghent A version of the transformation that took place in Ghent was played out everywhere in northern Europe, but each story is particular to the legal jurisdiction in which it occurred, for customary law is by definition local and particular. Ghent is an ideal setting for such a study, not just because it has preserved the necessary sources. It was the second largest northern city of the fourteenth and much of the fifteenth century. Until the end of the Middle Ages when Antwerp, then Amsterdam and still later London displaced it, Ghent was also northern Europe’s leading center of
8 The surviving spouse had rights to half the income of this property for life. See below for a fuller discussion of Ghent’s customary marital property law.
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commercially oriented industry. Although almost entirely devoted to production for export and to trade itself, Ghent nevertheless honored the system of private property law traditional in this region of the North, carefully distinguishing movables from immovables and roughly equating the former with chattels (cateylen in the Dutch language of Ghent) and the latter with patrimony (erve). Ghent has left rich sources for tracing the long history of this custom. Most of the accessible documents are normative in character, ranging from occasional proclamations to rulings to formal statements of customary practices, and in their preponderance dating from the late thirteenth century to the first homologized custom of 1563. Similar records survive from later years as well, of course, but after 1563 the history of such texts is no longer Ghent’s alone, for the later records belong to a larger story of legal change driven by the ducal court and by legal theory explicitly drawn from Roman law as earlier custom was not. Another set of documents is less normative in character, for these consist of litigation records of various kinds, ranging from judgments handed down as a result of disputes to summaries of hearings in court. Four principal normative texts are a basis of this study, although they are supplemented by occasional proclamations, charters and similar texts. 1. The Grande Charte of 1297 (abbreviated here as GC), a privilege granted by the Count of Flanders to what was already his most important industrial center; 2. A text prepared by Ghent’s aldermen (scepenen), which exists in three manuscript versions, summarizing the customary rules of succession in Ghent and dating from the early sixteenth century (abbreviated here as SC); 3. A draft of the city’s entire custom, prepared by the aldermen in 1546 (abbreviated here as DC); 4. The 1563 homologized custom, a redraft of the 1546 custom which finally earned ducal approval (abbreviated here as HC). Alongside these normative texts two principal forms of “records of practice” survive: a selection of judgments or vonnissen rendered
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a seeded crop, one already in the ground but not yet ready for harvest, was customarily considered part of the land, which was undisputedly immovable. But according to a vonnis rendered by the aldermen in 1350, the surviving spouse of a marriage, in recognition of his or her rights to half of all movables in the estate, was to be compensated for the money that had been spent in preparing the ground and sowing the seed, presumably since that cost was assumed to have been borne by the couple together, out of their joint movable property. Having paid 50 per cent of planting, the reasoning must have been, the surviving spouse could be dispossessed of the eventual crop only after having been repaid his or her costs.12 That ruling assumed, however, that the crops were not ready for harvest. When the crop was closer to harvest the situation was muddied. A vonnis of 1371 decreed that “winter” crops in the ground were immovable, but only if the death of the landowner had occurred before mid-March.13 Accordingly, if one of the spouses were to have died on 31 March, the land alone would go to his or her direct heirs in its entirety, and the survivor would have rights to half the crop in the ground, implicitly on the theory that the a crop so close to harvest at the time of death was movable. If, however, the death were to have occurred on 1 March, the heirs would acquire both the land and the crop on the grounds that the seed had then not yet produced a recognizably “harvest-able” crop. According to the same ruling, summer crops became movable after mid-May, a position reiterated in a vonnis of 1415.14 Fruit trees caused as much confusion. Apple trees (appelboomen) more than “knee high,” for example, were specifically labeled movable in the early sixteenth-century listing of customary rules cited above, a statement seeming to confirm a vonnis from 1367 (here the term is bogarde or orchard).15 A turbe of 1525 seems, however, to have revised this norm, for there all “fruit trees” 12
Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 3-4 (vonnis of 26 July 1350, #2). Also see Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 72 (vonnis of 13 February 1370 (n.s.?), #14): seeded corn on a fief is movable even if the fief is not. 13 In Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 21-3 (vonnis of 10 December 1371, #24). “Winter” crops or “winter fruit” were those planted in fall for spring harvest. 14 Coutumes, 1: 588-90. These are crops sown in early spring for summer harvest. 15 Vonnis of 16 June 1367, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 21 (#23).
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(fruutboomen) were deemed movables, without qualification regarding height.16 The homologized custom of 1563 repeated the same blanket convention, adding that if the trees were located on a fief, along with its principal dwelling and major “shade” trees, they were nevertheless divisible as movables (here they were called fruytboomen).17 Although clear at one level—apple or fruit trees are movables—these texts are ambiguous at another, for it is not clear whether they had to have reached a certain growth. Nor is it obvious just what kind of trees were at issue. Were “apple trees,” “fruit trees” and “orchards” the same things in the eyes of litigants and the court alike? Nothing in the available sources directly tells us, but it is not unreasonable to suspect that the instability of terminology and the frequency with which fruit-bearing trees appear in our sources are the faint traces of debate about definition. When we turn from “fruit trees” to “trees” more generally, our suspicions are further aroused, for the texts are replete with signs of quarrels, indecision, and changes of direction. Some texts flatly labeled trees movable, but others implied that only certain trees, of certain heights or age, or in certain locations were movable.18 16
Turbe of September 1525, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 2: 79 (#1). HC, Articles XXV-4 and 34. 18 Vonnis of 12 October 1367, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 21, #24; vonnissen of 1399 and 1415 in Coutumes, 1: 564-9 and 588-90; DC of 1546, article V-3; HC of 1563, XX-3 and passim. A vonnis of 1363 decreed bushes (bosch) movable if “one customarily cut them,” and another of 1367 confirmed that willows (wulghen) were movable, both texts suggesting by their very existence that litigants had contested the principle and were seeking exceptions (vonnis of 29 June 1363, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 16, #17; vonnis of 12 May 1367, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 20-1, #22). The sixteenth century SC introduced more vocabulary, this time leaving little doubt that the category “trees” was unstable. Article 17 of that text flatly declared “upgaende boomen, drooghe often groene” (grown trees, dry or green) movable, whether on fief or free land (“leen of erve”), whether inside the city or outside it (“binnen der stede often buuten”). Article 20 declared tronckycken (oaken stumps) movable if the trijshoudt (branches or twigs) were older than seven years (the branches themselves were also movable, the authors of the document took pains to remark). Dornehagen (hedges of pine evergreens), however, were movable after three years (article 21), while in article 22 it was explained that elshaghen (hedges of alders) had to wait five years. A turbe of 1531 seemed, however, to overturn the earlier statement regarding tronckeycken; here they were declared movable, even if located on a fief, and no age limit was indicated (turbe of 17 May 1531, in Meijers, OVE, 17
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If we reflect on the role these goods played in the economy of the day, contemporaries’ evident concern with trees and crops, even fish and peat, becomes comprehensible. In this age seed yields were only about 4:1 or 5:1, crop yields seldom exceeded 5 bushels per acre (today they are easily 10-20 times that amount), and foodstuffs were relatively so expensive that a family’s subsistence diet took up a significant portion of the daily wage of an adult male unskilled worker, and in some years took all of it.19 Under those conditions, any surviving spouse, no matter how rich, would have hardly been indifferent to the decision taken about a crop’s movability (in which case he or she got half of it as his or her own), and the heirs of the land would have been as eager to have a decision counting it immovable (in which case they got it all, and had to share only half its income during the life of the surviving spouse). Wood, whether used for its fruit, fuel, furniture or construction, was even more valuable than a crop in the ground itself. This was, let us remember, a part of Europe where most woodland had long ago been decimated, where lords valued their privileged access to forests above most other rights, where Baltic lumber was not yet imported at the rate it would later be (and in any case was used principally Bijlage 2: 99-100, #37). A slightly earlier turbe of 1525 had provided the same ruling, but that text also introduced entirely new terms: hauten (wood) was movable, even if on a fief, but the shade trees (schauboomen) were not, and slachoudt (cut wood) was movable so long as the schueten (shoots or limbs) were at least three years old (turbe of September 1525, in Meijers, OVE, Bilage 2: 79, #1). The DC of 1546 declared that “boomen” (trees) were movable, excepting only the schauboomen (shade trees) on a fief. The HC of 1563 significantly elaborated this ruling: the movable or partible account included only those boomen whose trunks were wider than two hands and higher than the chest, along with troncken, again excluding the shade trees on fiefs. Article XXV-32 again named slachoudt (cut wood) movable, confirming the minimum age of three years, and the next article (XXV-33) reiterated that doornehagen were movable if three years old, but thought it necessary to elaborate, adding that the rys, haer of waey (twigs, sprigs, or branches) were included in that ruling. 19 For measures of subsistence wages in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see Jean-Pierre Sosson, Les travaux publics de la ville de Bruges, XIVe-XVe siècles: les matériaux, les hommes, Collection Pro Civitate, 48 (Brussels: Crédit Communal de Belgique, 1977), 230-1 and 308-9. Only master artisans in the building trades had incomes high enough to avoid risk of famine; day workers and journeymen regularly skirted disaster and sometimes met it. For the sixteenth century, see Johan Dambruyne, Corporatieve middengroepen: aspiraties, relaties en transformaties in de 16de-eeuwse Gentse ambachtswereld (Ghent: Academia Press, 2002), and the sources he cites.
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in shipbuilding and other major projects), and where peat was the sole readily available fuel substitute. People, even rich people, hoarded then wood carefully and used it sparingly; so cherished was this item that some people made special bequests of it in their wills.20 Similar struggles plagued Ghent’s neighbors and the decisions taken in Ghent regarding crops, trees, fish and the like resembled, even if they did not duplicate, those taken elsewhere. Gentenaren deviated dramatically from regional norms, however, in their treatment of houses and, especially, of land. All the records we have from Ghent, even the earliest, treat houses and similar structures as movable assets. The surviving texts, whether normative or practical, are unambiguous, even dully repetitive. A vonnis of 1350, another of 1359, a third in 1399 and a fourth in 1415 all routinely included huusen (“houses”) in their lists of movables or chattels.21 A turbe of 1529 flatly repeated the principle, while the SC of the early sixteenth century elaborated further: article 16 intoned that “all houses or parts of houses” were movable, a ruling repeated in the subsequent article as well.22 The DC of 1546 spoke even more aggressively: houses in Ghent are, according to the custom, “partible and considered chattels and movable property.”23 The HC of 1563 repeated that clause almost verbatim.24 20 See, for example, the dispute between a rich widow and her deceased husband’s heirs over household goods and the trees/lumber supplies on the land he had left (vonnis of 12 May 1367, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1, 20-1, #22). 21 Vonnis of 18 February 1350 (ns), in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 3, #4; vonnis of 8 April 1359, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 14, #14; vonnis of 1399, in Coutumes, 1: 564; vonnis of 1415, in Coutumes, 1: 588-90. 22 Turbe of 5 June 1529, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 2, 87-8, #17; SC, article 17: “huusen, schuren, stallen ende andere edificien, leeninghen ende latinghen, staende often wesende up leenen oft erven binnen der stede often buuten es gherekent often ghehauden muelbe (sic).” 23 Article X-25; repeated in VI-19 of the HC of 1563; also see article XXI-31 of DC 1546, where houses in the city are once again specifically labeled partible. 24 The only area of instability or uncertainty concerned houses located on land held in fief. While many of the available texts labeled them movable, as did article 17 of the early sixteenth-century SC cited above, others introduced qualifications. A vonnis of 1411-1412, for example, exempted houses on fiefs held of the Duke of Burgundy, ruling that their status was determined by the feudal court with specific jurisdiction (vonnis of 1411-1412, in Coutumes, 1: 582-4). A turbe of 1525 exempted the beste vuurst (best residence) on a fief,
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Ghent was not entirely alone in labeling houses movables, for some other areas of the North did so as well, Lille, Antwerp, several cities in West Flanders and some in Germany among them.25 But Ghent stands alone, as far as we know, in labeling most land movable. The story of how Ghent came to this decision is long and complicated. It originated in the awkward situation produced when a house and its tenure was being transferred at the end of a marriage. The house, being movable, was to be divided between the survivor of the marriage and the deceased’s lineal heirs (as a partible good), while the land, which was traditionally considered patrimonial and thus impartible, was to be passed directly to heirs. The result was confusion: the owner of the land was not the full owner of the house that stood on it, and the occupant of the house (typically the surviving spouse) was unlikely to hold the land rights. At some point during the fourteenth century, Ghent’s aldermen decided to treat these “packages” as movable if the land was encumbered by rental payments. The theory here was that the rental payments had been assumed in order to acquire land for building the house. Later even those conditions were dropped, and all land in the jurisdiction of Ghent, whether or not it paid rent and whether or not it was built, was considered movable. This left only land outside Ghent or land held in fief as potentially patrimonial property.26 and the DC of 1546 provided that a house in the countryside, although movable, could be kept whole by the landowner if she or she compensated the half-owner(s) for their share of its value (turbe of September 1525, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 2: 79, #1; DC of 1546, article XXI-36; repeated in HC of 1563, article XXV-35). 25 For West Flanders, see Meijers, OVE, 33, n.4 and more generally for the Low Countries, Godding, Le droit privé, 2d ed., 143-4. For Germany, see Ashaver von Brandt, “Mittelalterliche Bürgertestamente: Neuerschlossene Quellen zur Geschichte der materiellen und geistigen Kultur,” Sitzungberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaft, philosophisch-historische Klasse 5-32 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1973). 26 Meijers’s OVE traces this story. The transition is documented as early as the fourteenth century, when a vonnis of 1353 declared that “erve within Ghent on which rent was being paid were partible; others from 1371 and 1450 repeated the judgment (vonnis of 22 June 1353, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 4-7, #4; vonnis of 10 December 1371, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 21-3, #24; vonnis of 1450 in Coutumes 1: 628; vonnis of 22 November 1363, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 17-18, #19). The sixteenth-century SC confirms this reading. Following article 24, which explained that all unbuilt erve in Ghent held of lordships [paying traditional landcijns] were patrimonial, came article
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Debt obligations were, however, a considerably more complicated matter than either land or houses, and it was this category of asset (or liability if one was the borrower rather than the creditor) that provided Gentenaren a way to both serve the market and preserve wealth for heirs. Like all other known regions of customary law, Ghent assiduously preserved a key feature of the traditional law of patrimony: perpetual “rents,” what Gentenaren called erfrenten, retained patrimonial capacity, even if the rents were paid on land that was itself considered movable and partible. Like the history of land and its legal status in Ghent, the story of rents and other forms of indebtedness is a complex one, and its details beyond the scope of this essay. Its general shape is, however, evident. In Ghent, as in all regions of customary law, most debts were thought to be personal obligations, and thus to attach to the movable goods of the individual who incurred the debt, for that was the only property in his or her possession that was truly personal. A French adage of 25, which deemed movable all patrimonial property (erve) in Ghent that paid landcijns, implying by the contrast with article 24 that built land paying landcijns was intended. Danneel cites two cases appearing to indicate that if a house with land paying rent had been acquired before marriage or inherited during marriage, the land portion was treated as heritable and only the house entered the community of goods (Danneel, Weduwen en wezen, 268, n. 81). Meijers argues that it does not, and the cases he cites, as well as the normative texts, seem to support him. I have been able to check only one of her cases (Gedele 330, #39, fols. 133-4, 13 April 1491). There we indeed find an eervachticheden (patrimonial property) consisting of land and a house, and the aldermen did indeed determine that the land held side, while the house itself was partible. This land was, however, not in the jurisdiction of Ghent, but in Deestinghem, and according to Ghent’s custom as then expressed such land would indeed have “held side.” Whatever the confusions of the fifteenth century, the circle had closed by the sixteenth. All land in Ghent, whether actually encumbered or not, whether actually built or not, was chattel property and therefore partible. The ruling is first visible in a turbe of 1529 in which “all land within the jurisdiction of Ghent” was deemed cateyl (turbe of 1529, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 2: 91-2, #22). Section XXI-27 of the 1546 DC was equally precise: “Land ‘holds side’ except [my emphasis] land that is within the city, which is movable.” The 1563 HC extended the reach to the suburbs of Ghent: “land holds the side from which it came, along with the usufruct attaching to it, except [my emphasis] the land inside the city and outer fortifications of the city [which] is partible [movable] ... .”[ HC, article XXV-29]. No mention here of landcijns, none of houses. Land, whether or not encumbered or built, was movable if it was in the jurisdiction of Ghent.
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the day expressed the concept succinctly: “meubles sont sièges des dettes.”27 The notion that debts were personal and thus payable out of personal—movable—property alone had important implications for economic life. Debts “owned” by lenders (what we might call “collectables, “accounts receivable,” “debt payments due,” and the like) could easily be bought and sold, allowing lenders to trade future income for present cash. For example, a lender who was due 100 pounds but who needed the funds immediately could sell that debt to a third person, who would then collect the amount due from the borrower. Lenders had other advantages as well because they could claim all the borrower’s movables in case of default and did not have to rely on a single asset for their security. The Jaarregisters of Ghent’s aldermen of the “Keure” contain eloquent testimony to the ubiquity of such unsecured debt.28 During the month of December 1400 alone, for example, Gentenaren registered 114 transactions with the aldermen. Fifty-nine of the entries—over half—recorded debt obligations of unspecified origin 27
Cited in Patault, Droit des biens, 282. The central fundament of the basic rule was preserved in all the normative statements issued by aldermen and in all the rulings issued by municipal courts. A vonnis of 1350 flatly declared, for example, that debts were to be charged against the movable account of a marriage (vonnis of 15 August 1350, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 4, #3). Another of 1371 was similar: all “huutsculden, insculden, baten ende comer” (“payments or receipts on debts, income and expenses”) were movable (vonnis of 10 December 1371 in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 21-3, #24). Article 2 of the early sixteenth century SC confirmed the rule, specifically naming all “schulden van baten ende van commerce” (“all obligations arising from income and expenses”), while article 32 of the same text mentioned “all debts” and article 26 broadly included all “besproken blat” (“encumbered revenue”). A turbe of 1531 listed all “contracten [ende] obligatien.” (“contracts and obligations”) (turbe of 12 July 1531, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 2: 100, #3). The DC of 1546 continued the litany; the HC of 1563 repeated the sentiment. 28 From the fourteenth century forward, civil (private) matters were dealt with by two separate groups of aldermen (scepenen), the “Keure” and the “Gedele.” The former dealt with matters of property transactions, debts, etc., the latter largely with inheritance and what were called “zoenen” or compensation payments for personal (and physical) injury. The annual registers of the Keure (the Jaarregisters van de Keure, series 301) were the transcriptions of agreements (of a financial nature) voluntarily brought to the aldermen for registration. For a fuller study of this source, see Philippe Lardinois, “Diplomatische studie van de akten van vrijwillige rechtspraak te Gent van de XIIIe tot de XVe eeuw,” Licenciaat, U. Ghent (1975-6). A summary of the thesis was published in Hand. Maatsch. Geschiedenis Gent 31 (1977): 65-75.
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and without specific security, just as custom imagined.29 Another fifteen of the 114 did specify how the debt had originated, but they did not imply that the object purchased with the money lent was specific security for the loan. Although this evidence seems to insist that secured debts were unknown to medieval custom, the contrary is in fact the case. The techniques for securing long-term debt developed slowly and hesitatingly, however, for medieval people faced opposition both from spiritual authorities and customary secular law. The problem for the church was usury, for payments on a secured loan looked suspiciously like interest charges unless they totaled no more than the precise amount of the loan—a deal no long-term lender could accept.30 The problem in secular custom involved patrimonial rights. Only an immovable good could properly secure a loan, for only such an asset would hold value and generate income to service the loan. Such assets were, however, the source of patrimonial wealth—wealth due heirs—and in the medieval imagination those heirs were due their property free of debt. No individual, it was thought, could encumber his or her heirs. Accordingly, the only obligations that could attach to or pass with patrimonial assets were those integral to its use, and such obligations were generally understood to be permanent and of a tenurial nature. The old medieval cens (census in Latin) and aides, the dues or honorific payments to lords that traditionally were exacted from all users of non-allodial land, were prototypical.31 29
This material is all taken from the inventories and case summaries of the Jaarregisters published by the municipal archive of Ghent: Regesten op de Jaarregisters van de Keure [Inventarissen en Indices gepubliceerd door het Archief, Stad Gent], ed. J. Boon (Ghent: Stad Gent, 1969) covers 1353-54 and 1357-58; Regesten op de Jaarregisters van de Keure, ed. J. Boon (Ghent: Stad Gent, 1968) covers 1339-40, 1343-44, 1345-46, and 1349-50; the three volumes of Regesten op de Jaarregisters van de Keure from 1967, 1970, and 1972 [no named editor] cover 1400-01) [hereafter RJR]. 30 John H. Munro’s “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution: Usury, Rentes, and Negotiability,” The International History Review 25 (3) (2003): 505-62, provides a nuanced discussion of usury laws and their effects on financial markets. His references are extensive, but also see Joel Kaye, “Changing Definitions of Money, Nature, and Equality (c.1140-1270) and Their Place within Thomas Aquinas’ Questions on Usury,” Credito e usura fra teologia, diritto e amministratione. Linguaggi a confronto (sec, XII-XIV) (CNRS, École française de Rome, Università di Trento, forthcoming). 31 The history of debt in medieval Europe with respect to immovables is ex-
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It was precisely the census or cens, however, which provided the necessary structure for secured debt because it was early and easily conflated with what was called a rente foncière or bail à rente. Originally considered a kind of perpetual lease of land in exchange for a perpetual rent (thus, bail à rente), this instrument could also be seen as a sale of land in exchange for a perpetual rent (rente foncière). In either case no loan was involved—thus, no usury. The critical shift, however, was to what were called rentes à prix d’argent or rentes constituées. In this case, money was given in exchange for rent payments in perpetuity, the money being used by the debtor either to purchase the asset securing the “debt” or, more commonly as time went on, to invest elsewhere. In the latter case, the “debt” was secured by an asset that the debtor already owned. Although this device had all the earmarks of a secured debt, medieval people managed to conceptualize it as a sale (of money) in return for a perpetual rent, thus aligning it with the rente foncière or old census—and avoiding both usury prohibitions and disgruntled heirs. About a third of the entries in the indexed volumes of the Jaarregisters concern such debts. For example, in exchange for an unnamed amount of money, Jan Sersanders issued a rent (erfelijke rente) to Jan van Maelgavere of 2 shillings gros tournois per year, secured by a house and tenement (erf). The property was already encumbered with a rent of 2 shillings gros tournois, payable to a third party, so Sersander’s ability to borrow against it a second time indicates that the property produced at least 4 shillings of income a year.32 All such rents were treated as immovable patrimony and thus as impartibles. A vonnis of 1352-1353, for example, clearly declared “eerve, eeveliike rente” impartible; again in 1372 the same language appears.33 The rule is invariable, and is repeated with casual assurance throughout the period studied. If the perpetual tremely complex and hard to document in its specifics for a particular locality. The fullest study of rents, as they had evolved by the end of the Middle Ages and developed in sixteenth-century France (Paris above all), is Bernard Schnapper, Les rentes au XVIe siècle: histoire d’un instrument de crédit (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1957). Also see Godding, Le droit privé and Munro, “The Medieval Origins.” 32 RJR, #510, fol. 24v/1. 33 Vonnis of 22 June 1353, in both Coutume, 1: 529-40, and Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 4-7, #4; vonnis of 12 November 1372, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 23-9, #25.
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rent was repurchaseable by the borrower, however, the situation was more complicated in secular law. These losrenten, as they were called in Ghent, were structured just like erfrenten but the borrower could repay the obligation, whenever desired, at some amount that had been fixed in the original loan agreement. More than any other financial instrument of the age, these most resemble our secured loans—and least resemble the old tenurial rent. Because they were detachable from the asset (when redeemed), these debts could logically be considered movable, and that is what several early sixteenth-century texts provided.34 Other texts, however, offered a different interpretation. A turbe of 1528 declared all besette renten (secured rents) immovable except lijfrenten, thereby implying that secured losrenten were immovable.35 Article 27 of the early sixteenth-century SC repeated the same rule, as did a turbe of 1530.36 The DC of 1546 as well as the HC of 1583 were clearer still: all “realized” losrenten were treated as immovables, even if the security was a “movable” house, for under such conditions the rent attached to the real property and followed it.37 By the sixteenth century, then, redeemable rents, even if secured by an asset undisputedly movable such as a house, were considered patrimonial and, as such, immovable.38 34
A turbe of 5 June 1529, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 2: 87-8, #17, specified that they were movable (common) unless purchased with the proceeds of the sale of an immovable erve. Another of 10 December 1529, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 2: 92, #23, treated losrenten as movables in that they were part of common account. Again, see further in this text for a discussion of this relationship. This judgment, however, contradicted another turbe (of 9 September 1528, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 2: 83-4, #9, where besette (secured) losrenten were treated as immovables. The difference may lie in the term “besette.” See note 40 below for an explanation of this term. 35 Turbe of 9 September 1528, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 2: 83-4, #9. 36 Turbe of 10 October 1530, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 2: 96, #31. 37 The term “realized” rents first appears in sixteenth-century texts, as an explicit reference to a process of formal “registration” (which could have been oral) of a secured obligation. Once “realized,” a debt was pursuable in court and the security underlying it attachable. I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Philippe Godding for this explanation. The clause is found in DC XXI-18 and in HC XXV-8 (the term appears elsewhere in these texts as well; see, for example, XXV-40 of the HC). 38 In what might seem a gross contradiction, however, the income received by the lender of the funds was treated as a movable (HC, article XXV-27). The logic is, however, clear. Losrenten, being secured by immovables, had to stay attached to that immovable if the creditor was to be properly secured.
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Clearly, Gentenaren, like others of their age, conceptualized perpetual rents as a different kind of debt, not in fact as “debt” per se but as a quasi-tenurial arrangement. As such these assets lodged, ultimately, with the family line and were not freely available to the market.39 The individuals paying the rents (the borrowers) also treated their payments as patrimonial in that they passed to heirs along with the property securing the rent. Oddly, however, this meant that a rent secured by a house and building lot was divided between heirs and the successor to a portion of the house. The rent attached to the land went to the heir of the land; half the rent went with half the house to the heir, and the other half went to the surviving spouse. By the late Middle Ages a new form of the rente constituée was at least as common, and its appearance further disturbed traditional norms. This was the annuity or, in French, rente viagère (lijfrent in Dutch). Although structured exactly like the rente constituée, the annuity was not perpetual but was due only for the life of the creditor (or the group of creditors, since such annuities were typically written on several lives—husband and wife, or sometimes the entire nuclear family). The obligation to pay rent ceased when the creditor(s) died; then the borrower would own the pledged property free and clear. In this case, the connection between the financial instrument and its security was, in effect, temporary, and annuities themselves had short lives—or in any case non-perpetual lives. Annuities were, thus, movables, and belonged in the partible accounts of Gentenaren.40 While the income from the rent could float free of the property and be considered “personal” to the lender, the capital tied up in debt had to be attached specifically to the asset generating the debt; in that way the creditor was still secured, even if the property was sold to a third party or passed on to heirs. 39 This was a fraught issue everywhere in Europe. For a discussion of the wide variety of solutions, and the patterns of resolution in customary law, see Schnapper, Les rentes, 244-60. 40 Vonnis of 14 August 1355, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 8, #6 (here it was explained that the rent had been purchased with common property during the marriage so the income was, naturally, common as well). A vonnis of 1 April 1359, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 12-13, #13, specified that even if the rental payment was secured by immovab1es that belonged to one spouse alone the obligation to service the annuity was movable; vonnis of 10 December 1371 in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 21-3, #24, explained that the annuity payments received were movables if both they had been acquired with common
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The Import of Change This legal history can seem a linear story in which Gentenaren gradually allowed the imperatives of commerce to trump the weight of medieval tradition. There is no doubt that the category of movables and thus of partibles was dramatically increased as the Middle Ages came to a close. We can also understand why Gentenaren would have wanted to make such adjustments to law. Being dependent on industry and trade for their livelihoods and social position, we might reason, Gentenaren would have been easily inclined to treat all goods as movables, since movables alone could be freely released to the market. If, however, we study the entire three centuries of change, if we look not just at the situations where property was freed but also at those where it was not, and if we also observe what Gentenaren actually did with wealth that was considered immovable—we can no longer tell Ghent’s story as the triumph of commerce over medieval legal tradition. Rather, we come to see that the imperatives of commerce were in constant tension with older and more deeply seated notions imbedded in the very concept of patrimony: property rights were the basis of social order, the mechanism by which people were connected to each other through time and space and, not incidentally, the means for establishing hierarchies among them. Hence, even if Gentenaren accepted that all wealth had to be released to the market, they were also convinced that the market alone could not be permitted to allocate property rights. Instead, they believed, property rights should ultimately be conferred by kinship status, and by that mechanism both gender and class hierarchies could be constructed and preserved. To achieve these apparently incommensurate goals, Gentenaren manipulated the partible/impartible divide at the heart of their marital property law. As we have seen, in Ghent’s custom movable
(movable) property. A turbe of 9 September 1528, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 2: 83-4, #9, went on to specify that they were partible even if secured by erve (“besetten”). These rules were repeated in the SC of the early sixteenth century (article 26) and in the DC of 1546 (XXI-20) as well as the HC of 1563 (XXV-22). Thus, the annuity payments received by the purchaser during life were counted as movables, as were the payments made by the borrower, and the cash received by the borrower when the loan was first made went into the borrowers’ movable account.
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goods were not only equated with chattels, they were automatically considered partible. All partible goods belonged to what Gentenaren called the community of goods or the community (common) fund that was created when a woman and man married.41 Community goods were the joint property of both spouses, and at the death of either spouse, the survivor (or the lineal heirs of the survivor) had a full claim to 50 per cent of those assets, no matter their composition. Although the fund was technically jointly owned, during the marriage it was in fact entirely managed—and effectively owned—by the husband. As head of household he could buy, sell, exchange, alienate, or encumber the assets however he wished, without asking permission of his wife or her particular heirs.42 It was only when he died that the woman acquired her rights, but even then she assumed ownership only of 50 per cent of the assets; the other half passed to the deceased husband’s lineal heirs. Even if those heirs were minor children born of the marriage and the widow managed the assets on their behalf, she did so only as trustee and under the supervision of adult relatives of the deceased husband. The reverse was also true; if the wife died first, the 50 per cent of the community account that ultimately belonged to her passed to her lineal heirs, preferentially to her children; the survivor of her marriage, even if he was the father of those children, did not have full authority over that portion of the community account. The surviving spouse of the marriage did, however, have lifetime rights to half the income from the portion of the community account (thus 50 per cent of the income from 50 per cent of the community account) that had passed to heirs of the deceased, but those rights expired at the death of the survivor. It was thus a supremely important matter to decide whether a good belonged in the community account. Although goods labeled “community” were by definition the equivalent of partible goods, 41
Legal historians argue that the community property account central to marital property law in this region of Europe was a residue of old systems in which the entire family constituted the community. For this argument, see P. Ourliac and J. de Malafosse, Histoire du droit privé, 3, Le droit familial (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). For examples of non-marital communities, see Jean Hilaire, “Vie en commun: famille et esprit communautaire,” Nouvelle revue historique de droit français et étranger, 4th ser., 51 (1973): 8-53. 42 See article XXI-7 of the DC, which was especially clear on this principle. The clause was repeated, almost verbatim, in HC of 1563, article XX-23.
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neither was contained by the terms “chattel” or “movable.” To be sure, all goods traditional law had considered movable or chattel were automatically labeled partible—furniture, cash, unsecured debts, raw materials, inventories, accounts receivable, clothing, jewelry, arms, kitchenware, household provisions, and animals.43 And, we have seen, by the 1500s the category of movable chattel had been radically expanded, leaving perpetual rents and land outside Ghent as the only significant outlyers. Another feature of custom expanded the partible account still further. Any good acquired after marriage, unless acquired by inheritance or gift promised before marriage, was added to the community account. This could—and did—include land both inside and outside Ghent and perpetual rents, as well as all goods considered movable chattel, for the implied assumption was these assets had been acquired with funds earned during marriage or obtained by sale of other goods in the community account. But there remained a potentially significant category of wealth that would not enter the community account. In the language of Ghent’s custom, these were impartibles. In contrast to partible goods that entered the community account and were under full control of the husband during marriage, impartibles were individually owned during marriage, and they were the residual property of lineal heirs of the spouse who possessed them. During marriage, the husband could manage his wife’s impartible goods, but he 43 Various clauses of the HC of 1563 laboriously detailed the items included: article XXV-4, for example, listed “houses, trees grown to the width of a man’s hand span and chest high, logs, chattels, leases and mortgages, minted and unminted coin, jewels and baubles, household furnishings, weapons, bows, stocks of munitions, horses and harnesses, peat and stone that has been mined ... excepting the shade trees and best residence on a fief that are expected to follow the fief”; article XXV-6 listed houses or parts of houses in addition to all movables acquired during marriage; article XXV-22 listed annuities (lijfrenten) XXV-24 listed income due from leases but not yet paid; XXV-27 included the income from repurchaseable rents (losrenten); XXV-28 specified non-hypothecated (“onbesette”) rents, no matter if they had been purchased with impartibles that “held side”; XXV-30 included windmills on fiefs, excepting the parts that were not physically movable; windmills on simple erve, however, were movable in their entirety; XXV-31 provided that watermills were movable just like houses and trees, even if on a fief but in that case the “stoel metten legghere” [chair with mill-stone] went with the fief; subsequent articles XXV-32-38 provided detailed instructions about trees and fish, while XXV-39 declared all “personal debts arising from expenses” partible.
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could not sell, encumber, or otherwise alienate these goods without her explicit consent.44 At death, the impartibles of the deceased passed to lineal heirs, and the surviving spouse had only lifetime rights to half the income produced by the assets; his or her heirs did not assume those rights at the survivor’s death. Because all movables were by definition partible, all impartibles were necessarily immovables but only certain immovables acquired this status, for, as we have seen, immovables acquired during marriage with common funds, as well as land within Ghent’s jurisdiction, were considered partible. This left land outside Ghent’s jurisdiction; as explained in article XXV-29 of the HC, it “held side.”45 Other articles in that text included rents that had been secured before marriage as well as land and secured rents acquired by gift or inheritance during marriage.46 In sum, by 1563 at the latest, only land outside Ghent and perpetual rents (including redeemable rents) remained impartible and then if and only if the property had been acquired or pledged before marriage or if given specifically to one of the spouses by a third party (even during marriage). When overlaid on the old movable/immovable divide, the partible/impartible binary provided Gentenaren a way to limit the free circulation of wealth and direct it where they wanted it to go. Customary marital property law was Gentenaren’s chief tool in their larger social project because it, almost alone, governed all marital property relations, succession, and inheritance in this city. Published law after published law proclaimed this principle, and court case after court case reflected its precepts. Thus Gentenaren were denied the right to issue wills privileging a spouse more than custom would have allowed, and they were forbidden to write marriage contracts instituting terms in violation of custom. Only in 1563 was the latter prohibition overturned.47 Ghent was, thus, a
44
See, for example, article 4 of SC. A turbe of 12 July 1531, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 2: 100-1, #39, went further, specifying that a husband could not “encumber, alienate or sell” “errgront, erfachtycheid often erfvelicke rente” without his wife’s permission. 45 Article XXV-8. 46 Articles XXV-40 and XXV-55. 47 Vonnis of 1352-3, pp. 529-40. Also see vonnis of 22 June 1353, in Meijers, OVE, Bijlage 1: 4-7, #4; SC, article 6 and DC, articles XXI-2 and 11 repeated the rules. Article XX-20 of the HC, however, flatly overruled these proscriptions.
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relative latecomer to the marriage contract, and its citizens resorted to such legal mechanism only in rare circumstances.48 In sum, all the presently available evidence depicts people who almost always married under the terms of custom and fought their battles in court over its terms.49 If they did not—and a few evidently did not—they were careful to make a public record of their decision and often to specially register their heirs’ consent to the new terms. This does not mean that custom perfectly satisfied the needs of all but a few Gentenaren. On the contrary. The entire 48
While all the evidence suggests that Gentenaren did not regularly issue marriage contracts, but instead allowed custom to govern marital property relations and succession, some people not only chose to overwrite custom, they also got away with it, all the assertions of published law notwithstanding. It is impossible to know how many of these instances there were, for the only records we have of such contracts are buried in the hundreds of manuscript volumes of Jaarregisters van de Keure housed in Ghent’s municipal archive, the registers in which private agreements of sales, loans, debt settlements and the like were recorded. Indices have been published for only seven years of the medieval centuries (1339-40, 1343-4, 1345-6, 1349-50, 1353-4, 1357-8, and 1400-01), and these provide our only systematic guide to the frequency and nature of such contracts. To judge from these documents alone, however, the marriage contract was rarely used in medieval Ghent. Of the 1,427 entries in the Jaarregisters indexed for the six years 1339-40, 1343-4, 1345-6, 1349-50, 1353-4, and 1357-8, only ten marriage contracts are mentioned, two of which the aldermen later crossed out as inoperative. Among the 1,580 entries for the single year 1400-1401, there are only two. Thanks to David Nicholas’s research for his Domestic Life in a Medieval City (Lincoln, Neb.: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1985) we know, in addition, of some 16 additional marriage contracts issued between 1345 and 1390 and also registered in the Jaarregisters van de Keure. Altogether then, we have 26 marriage contracts for a period of about 60 years. Fifteen of the 26 appear to violate terms of custom, but 6 of those elaborately detail the consents obtained from heirs whose interests were at stake in the changes, leaving only 19 in 60 years that appear to have violated custom’s norms. 49 It is also possible that marriage contracts were registered elsewhere than in the Jaarregisters and were simply not mentioned in the published inventory, but that seems unlikely given the care with which the archive has otherwise been catalogued. Some are referenced in the voluminous Weezenboec[en] where inheritance arrangements were registered, for many of these entries concern the settlement of orphans’ estates or the terms of wills, and in those texts it is possible to find occasional discussion of a prior marriage contract that set forth the terms of the inheritance. But most of those texts assume custom’s rules. It is also possible that Gentenaren simply did not register such contracts, but that too seems unlikely given the solicitude they showed in registering financial agreements of considerably less importance and given as well the risks that a disgruntled heir or spouse would challenge a marriage contract that violated published law and had not been publicly registered.
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legal record from Ghent—the editions of custom, the court disputes, and even the rare marriage contracts issued to override or supplement custom—speak eloquently about the social tensions embedded in the property relations constructed by marriage in this age, tensions which had their source in the conflict between the interests of the nuclear family on the one hand (“le ménage”) and those of the “line” on the other (“le lignage”). This was, however, but an expression, the exposed surface, of a deeper conflict in the cultural, social, and economic meaning of property. After all, the motor of the struggle between the “ménage” and the “lignage” could not simply have been “tension” between the conjugal unit and the wider kin group, although that is its structural precondition, because such tension is endemic to all societies where women marry out of the line and carry patrimonial property with them.50 The evidence from Ghent allows us to go deeper. The power that energized this structural tension there (and I would venture everywhere in commercialized Europe during the age) was the change in the nature of wealth and the proliferation of its meanings, in all senses of the word—economic, legal, social, and cultural—as movable wealth exploded in quantity and kind. With this explosion, the traditional axes by which property relations had been organized—the distinction between patrimony and chattels, between family or kin interests on the one hand and individual interests on the other—was disturbed, and these axes were thus the ground on which this story of “lignage” vs. “ménage” was played out.
Wealth as Capital; Capital as Patrimony This legal record reveals that Ghent did not steadily progress towards what is called a classic market economy, a world of easily fungible property subjected to a logic of profit and price. Rather, 50 For a structural analysis of these exogamous marriages and the social tensions they produce, see Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976) and his Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983). The basic text for this approach is Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. J. H. Bell et al. (Boston: Beacon Press,1969).
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Gentenaren deviated from that course by finding new ways to sequester wealth, in implicit refusal of such imperatives. In doing so, Gentenaren were enacting a sociocultural logic peculiar to their age. To understand their behavior and its historical significance, we must understand the assumptions about property that informed it. For them, property, or what they typically called “goods” (goeden), was constitutive of the self. Goods had cultural and thus social significance that did not just exceed their potential market value, but frequently trumped it. These assumptions about property’s meaning were the fundaments of a venerable and deeply rooted economic culture in which land had almost iconic status. For centuries, land had been not only the principal form of capital, it was also, in the legal and cultural imagination, the only one. Land was also the basis of the medieval social order. Peasants were not people who “farmed land” but a social class constituted by their rights to work and inherit the land and to pass those rights to heirs. They did not “do” peasantry; they were peasants. Similarly, aristocrats claimed noble or high gentry status because they lived from what other people produced for them—from the land—not simply because they were rich. Ghent’s traditional custom, with its clear distinction between movables and immovables, its easy elision of immovables and patrimony and its implicit equation of both with land, was the legal expression of this cultural logic. Thus, although Gentenaren manipulated law so that they could easily buy and sell, alienate and encumber most of their property at will, they did not abandon their culture’s insistence that property—concrete forms of property—constituted an individual socially. They also eagerly acquired and hoarded land outside Ghent, often even abandoning more profitable opportunities in commerce in order to become land “barons.” While these decisions had a kind of economic rationality, land being a considerably less risky investment than many commercial ventures, the principal rewards of land-owning, at least for urbanites, were not economic but social. Land was the premier vehicle of social promotion in this age. Thus, even as urbanites helped commodify land, they intensified its sociocultural value, for land could powerfully evoke the old equation between property and status.51 Rents were a close second as status-builders 51
The literature treating this process is rich. For a general summary, with
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and were considerably easier to acquire. Many rents were actually paid in kind, not coin, a practice that had practical advantages for bourgeois purchasers because it guaranteed them food supplies, but it also had cultural import, for it materially expressed the ideological link between rents and land.52 For people such as Gentenaren, luxury movables such as jewelry and clothing participated in the same logic. Cloth and clothing played a particularly complex role, however, because although they were traditionally powerful markers of status and social identity, they were also the preeminent commodities of the age. Their increasing abundance, the proliferation of variety, and their easy circulation steadily eroded the old equation between the self and the self’s vestments.53 Urbanites like those in Ghent played a major useful references, see Fernand Braudel’s magisterial The Wheels of Commerce, vol. 2 of Civilization and Captialism, 15th-18th Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1982), 249-51 and passim. 52 Schnapper, Les rentes, provides details about the history of these two credit instruments in the Parisian region, and presents data showing the extent to which rental payments were made in kind (see in particular pp. 80-3). The Jaarregisters van de Keure in Ghent provide scattered information confirming the same pattern. Although it seems that most rents in Ghent were expressed (if not paid) in monies of account (the pound groot, the pound parisis, or the gros tournois); they were of course paid in coin or kind. A few entries suggest the mix: for example, RJR, #576, fol. 28/6 (“... tot het betalen van 2 last torven [turf] op 4 schilden ...); 36, fol. 25v/5; RJR, #606, fol. 30v/5 (“... een erfrente van 4 lb. 15s. par. + 4 6/8 kapoenen ...”); RJR, #620 fol. 91v/2 (“... tot het betalen van 7 zakken en 7 mud tiendekoren [Aalsterse maat]...”). The so-called “Orphans’ Books” or Weezenboecen from Ghent provide more concrete evidence of Gentenaren’s commitment to land. These registers contained records of estate settlements and similar agreements, including the accounts registered on behalf of children who had lost a parent, for at that moment, as we have seen, the marital property fund was distributed among the survivor and heirs of the marriage. Thus, any so-called orphan standing to inherit any significant amount of property would have been registered here, and the properties to which he or she was heir would be listed, at least in summary form. For the four years from 1349/50 to 1352/53, 239 such accounts were registered, of which 79 listed only movables (excluding all real estate) among the assets to be distributed. About one-third held real estate Ghent, although only about 5 per cent of the accounts listed significant holdings. 53 The history of clothing and consumption has in recent years been given serious attention. Building on an older literature treating costume or dress on the one hand and sumptuary legislation on the other, sociocultural historians and cultural studies scholars have taken up the more subtle questions regarding the relationship of clothing and consumption to the creation of the early modern individual. Important literature (with useful guides to bibliogra-
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role in this disruption, for they were both producers and purveyors of these goods. At the same time, urbanities were also prodigious purchasers of such luxuries and it is in that capacity that they most clearly displayed their attachment to more traditional ideas of property’s meaning. In that role, they were not so much consumers as obsessive acquirers, for they collected, hoarded, and displayed their possessions as though they were the material embodiments of an imagined self.54
phy) includes John Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993); Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Anne Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Also see Sarah-Grace Heller, “Anxiety, Hierarchy and Appearance in Thirteenth-Century Sumptuary Laws and The Romance of the Rose,” French Historical Studies 27-2 (2004): 311-48, for a useful discussion of the royal French sumptuary legislation and its confused textual and bibliographic history; for Italy see Diane Owen Hughes, “Regulating Women’s Fashion,” in Christiane Klapisch- Zuber ed., Silences of the Middle Ages, Vol. 2 of A history of Women in the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992) and Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); for Germany, see Neithard Bulst, “Zum Problem städtischer und territorialer Kleider-, Aufwands-, und Luxusgesetzgebung in Deutschland (13.—Mitte 16. Jahrhundert),” in André Gouron and Albert Rigaudière, eds., Renaissance du pouvoir législatif et genèse de l’état (Montpellier: Socapress, 1988) and Kent Roberts Greenfield, “Sumptuary Law in Nürnberg: A Study in Paternal Government,” Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical-Political Sciences 36 (2) (1918): 1-139; for England, Claire Sponsler, “Narrating the Social Order: Medieval Clothing Laws,” Clio 21 (3) (1992): 265-82. I know of no full study of such legislation in the late medieval southern Low Countries, and of no source collections containing such legislation. 54 The relative importance of movables, including luxury movables, in the asset structure of urbanities is well understood, but many historians have argued, following Sombart and others, that such goods had their most comfortable home in the early modern court, among nobles, and they have pointed out that sobriety of dress came to mark the bourgeoisie of certain areas (Amsterdam, for example). See Werner Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism, trans. Philip Siegelman (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. of Michigan Press,1967); Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Blackwell, 1982, c. 1978) locates such consumption in a larger process of “civilizing.” Braudel returns to this issue (The Wheels of Commerce, 488-91). Although Braudel generally assents to the argument that luxury goods were the special obsession of the courtly aristocracy, he acknowledges that in some cities, in certain periods, urbanites were just as avid consumers of these products. Certainly this was the case in the rich cities of the late medieval southern Low Countries, surely influenced by the sumptuous court of the Duke of Burgundy
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City people enacted another aspect of this sociocultural logic by exchanging their goods on non-market terms. Rather than buying and trading these goods in response to price and profit, they often used them as gifts, thereby seeking to fix them in social place, clearly attach them to another person.55 The resistance to a market logic implicit in these actions was more than an earlier version of the hesitation we exhibit today when we collect family heirlooms and make gifts of them, when we keep unprofitable family farms rather than sell them to shopping-center developers for easy gains, or when we participate in what anthropologists have called distinct “realms of value” where such goods as antiques or artworks circulate, far outside the arena where interchangeable commodities are traded. But our passion for the uncommodifiable is not theirs. Rather than investing ourselves in particular possessions, we lust for many things, not for this or that precise thing except for brief moments, in rarified settings, or in occasional instances of sentithat resided in these cities, and the pattern continued there after the Dutch Revolt. And even the subdued garments of the Amsterdam patriciate were extraordinarily costly, it should be remembered, for their black woolens and velvets and their starched collars were unmistakable marks of luxury—and, not incidentally, the dress of the contemporaneous Hapsburg court. Braudel is certainly correct, however, to point out that dress—sober or fancy—was a contested site in the cultural history of the early modern bourgeoisie, and that the relationship between class and dress was unstable, if nevertheless highly significant. 55 The rich sociocultural history of the gift in late medieval and early modern Europe is treated in Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison, Wis.: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2000) and Valentin Groeber, Liquid Assests, Dangerous Gifts: Presents and Politics at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Pamela E. Selwyn (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). My own “Fixing Movables: Gifts by Testament in Late Medieval Douai,” Past and Present 150 (1996): 3-45, explores gifting practices via testament in the southern Low Countries. Much of the historical literature on gifts in this period considers them more exclusively in terms of their political significance, particularly their role in state building. See in this regard, W. Paravicini, “Introduction,” in W. Paravicini, ed., Invitations au marriage: pratique sociale, abus de pouvoir, intérêt de l’État à la cour des ducs de Bourgogne 1399-1489 (Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke, 2001); Maurice Arnould, “L’origine historique des pots-de-vin,” Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres et des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 5th ser., 62 (1976): 216-67; Alain Guery, “Le roi dépensier: le don, la contrainte, et l’origine du système financier de la monarchie francaise d’Ancien Régime,” Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilizations 34 (1984): 1241-64; Marc Boone, “Dons et pots-de-vin, aspects de la sociabilité urbaine au bas Moyen Age,” Revue du Nord 70 (278) (1988): 471-87.
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mentality. For us, the sphere of the non-commodifiable good is small indeed; today even babies, embryos, and body parts threaten to escape that tiny realm. While Gentenaren surely did not regard the easy fungibility of land, rents, family homes or even clothing with the same horror many of us view the selling of kidneys mined from the living, they, like all Europeans of their day, behaved as though goods could not be infinitely abstracted by money and thus rendered essentially identical. It was in this sociocultural context that Gentenaren adjusted law around the movable/immovable divide. Although the legal evidence reviewed here reflects this larger context only indirectly, it directly illustrates another aspect of this story. This is what other historians have called the “future-oriented” attitudes displayed when elites chose to buy assets such as land and rents rather than invest in commerce, industry, or agricultural improvements.56 The practices are well known to social historians, for they helped created the early modern “non-commercial” bourgeoisie—the elites of cities, courts and country manors in early modern Europe who lived from rents and office rather than pursuing the entrepreneurial activities that had made their predecessors rich. And, as scholars have also pointed out, this class prospered because such assets were transferred from generation to generation, thus solidifying—and rigidifying—a social hierarchy based on inheritance.57 In Ghent, this social process was managed via the impartible account where rents 56 For a discussion of this social process and its implications for the development of capitalism, see Ralph E. Giesey, “Rules of Inheritance and Strategies of Mobility in Prerevolutionary France,” American Historical Review 82 (2) (April 1977): 271-89. 57 Historians have referred to these practices as “the treason of the bourgeoisie,” thereby signaling urbanites’ abandonment of the commerce that had given them birth. Henri Pirenne’s “Stages in the Social History of Capitalism,” American Historical Review 19 (1914): 494-515, was an early statement of this position, a point of view elaborated by such scholars as Friedrich Lütge, Deutsche Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Berlin: Springer, 1952). For the Low Countries in particular, see Hugo Soly, “The ‘Betrayal’ of the Sixteenth-Century Bourgeoisie: A Myth? Some Considerations of the Behaviour Pattern of the Merchants of Antwerp in the Sixteenth Century,” Acta Historiae Neerlandicae 8 (1975): 31-9; and Marc Boone, “La terre, les hommes et les villes. Quelques considérations autour du thème de l’urbanisation des propriétaires terriens,” in Actes du 17e Colloque International, Spa 16-19 mai 1994, “La ville et la transmission des valeurs culturelles bas moyen âge et aux temps modernes,” Gemeentekrediet van België, historische reeks in-8, nr. 96 (Brussels: Crédit Communal de Belgique, 1996), 153-73.
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and land outside Ghent were carefully sheltered. There, as elsewhere, the law’s focus on the source of the particular assets eligible for impartible status was key to the social process: if these properties had come to the marriage by gift or inheritance they acquired patrimonial status; if purchased during marriage, they did not. Eligible property thus acquired its impartible status only in the second generation (since most gifts were made from one generation to the next and all inheritances flowed in that way). Once “in the family,” however—once passed from father or mother to child—such property could be repeatedly transferred from generation to generation, endlessly guaranteeing class status. It could even enhance class status, for the older the property, the more powerfully it established social rank. Any Gentenar seeking to preserve or create a stable social lineage was thus well advised, indeed compelled, to collect rents and rural properties and compelled to pass them as gifts or inheritances. In this way, Ghent’s custom both inscribed the practices of an emergent rentier class and helped to create it. Thus, Gentenaren were not capitalists manqués. While they understood and accommodated commerce, they also stubbornly refused the social implications of unbridled commoditization. They were not alone, as many historians have noted. While these patterns of investment and inheritance have been most obsessively studied in early modern France, they were not confined there. Propertied urbanites in Germany, Italy, England, and in the Low Countries, did the same.58 Almost next door to Ghent, in Douai, the pattern 58
Case studies such as Michel Mollat’s Jacques Coeur ou l’esprit d’entreprise au XVe siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1988) or Robert Forster’s Merchants, Landlords, Magistrates: The Dupont Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980) give particularly rich texture to this social history, and sociologically inspired research confirms the patterns. See, for a illustrative evidence, Robert S. Duplessis, Lille and the Dutch Revolt (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); Barbara Diefendorf, Paris City Councillors (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983); Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948); Albert Rigaudière, L’assiette de l’impôt à la fin du XIVe siècle. Le livre d’estimes des consuls de Saint-Flour—les années 1380-1385 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1977); P. Wolff, Commerce et marchands de Toulouse (vers 1350-vers 1450), (Paris: Plon, 1954); R. Fédou, Les hommes de loi lyonnais à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1964). George Huppert, Les bourgeois gentilshommes; an essay on the definition of elites in Renaissance France (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977) surveys and summarizes the literature on France, with references to
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is especially clear, thanks to the rich trove of marriage contracts left by its citizenry. So “uncommercial” did such behavior seem to Fernand Braudel that he declined to label these people bourgeois, even “non-commercial” bourgeois; instead he wanted to call them “honorables hommes” or even “gentry.” As he pointed out, these people were not distinguished by their entrepreneurial relationship to capital, but by their way of life, and their way of life was based on distinctive investment and inheritance practices, not on commerce and industry. Although these economic practices undoubtedly had a “stifling” effect on capitalistic development as some scholars have charged, because they immobilized assets that might have been more productively employed, it cannot be said that these choices represented an irrational retreat into the past.59 Rather, they were the solution to the problem of how to accommodate trade while assuring social order. And by “social order” people meant social privilege and class continuity. Hence they sought, and found, a way to let wealth circulate, but also to allow the most culturally significant goods to descend to lineal heirs. In this way, the market could flourish but hierarchy would be shored up, risks of social derogation minimized, and the newcomers more easily kept out. The evidence from Ghent not only illustrates this social history, it suggests that there was still more to this story. It links these social changes to a redefinition of property itself, giving people like the Gentenaren who stood at the center of this ideological upheaval an important role in the history of capitalism. The confusion about terminology that plagues the city’s legal sources, it is clear, was not just about words, not even fundamentally about law. It is the record of a sociocultural revolution essential to the future development of Europe’s capitalist market society. By its end, the revolution had emptied the term “immovable” of legal meaning, broken the venerable equation between land and patrimony, redefined property or what Gentenaren simply called “goods” as capital, and assigned new patrimonial status to a selected array of capital assets. A lot, it seems, was in a name.
other countries. 59 Giesey, “Rules of Inheritance,” summarizes the arguments in this vein.
CULTIVATION AND CONSUMPTION: MEDIEVAL LÜBECK’S GARDENS Charlotte Masemann
Garden production of food and other crops in medieval Lübeck took place on land located outside the city walls, in a broad belt around the city. Produce grown there was presumably sold and consumed within the city, although direct evidence on this point is somewhat lacking.1 Analysis of the evidence of this garden production reveals the types of crops grown in the gardens, some information on the size and value of the gardens, the location of the gardens and in some cases the identity of the owner or tenant. It also reveals a high degree of involvement of citizens of the city of Lübeck in the life of these gardens and a corresponding closeness in the urban-rural relationship. Archaeological evidence for the consumption of the produce grown outside the city underlines the importance of the urban-rural relationship. Much of the evidence for consumption of garden produce is derived from the ambitious archaeological program undertaken since the Second World War by the city of Lübeck. Archaeological material provides good evidence for consumption. Documentary evidence rarely identifies a plant to the species level; written sources are also generally quiet about food sources that are gathered rather than grown. Archaeological sources lack information on production, such as where and on whose land the plant was grown. A comparative approach to both kinds of evidence provides the fullest possible picture. The case of Lübeck’s urban gardens reveals a closeness in the urban-rural relationship.
1 Regulations concerning hawkers of fruit in the marketplace only appear beginning in the seventeenth century. Archiv der Hansestadt Lübeck (subsequently AHL), ASA Interna Markt 9/1 and 9/2 deal with apple-sellers (1614) and the sale of garden produce in the market (1669), respectively. In July 1465 a sea captain complained that his shipload of apples had been held up in Wisby, demonstrating that there was some longer-distance trade in this crop (Carl Wehrmann and Paul Hasse, eds., Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (subsequently LUB) (vol. 10), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 10 (Lübeck: Edmund Schmersahl Nachf., 1898), 10: 631.
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Lübeck, located on a peninsula where the rivers Wakenitz and Trave meet, just south of the Baltic coast in what is now SchleswigHolstein, was founded in the second half of the twelfth century. In 1300 the population of Lübeck was about 15,000 and by the beginning of the fifteenth century it numbered around 25,000.2 There were signs that the city was finding it difficult to contain all its inhabitants within its walls. A document from 1465 expressly forbids people from living in houses outside the city walls.3 The pressure of population, combined with this regulation and others like it, meant that by the sixteenth century many of the large blocks of land within the city were being subdivided. The small houses built between and behind the larger houses belonging to the wealthier members of the city were rented out to those with fewer financial resources.4 Passages were often constructed through these large houses in order to provide access to an alleyway, or Gang, with many small houses built on either side. Many of these Gänge survive into the present day.5 While the houses and their inhabitants have been closely researched, the land that was not built up, both within and just outside the city, has remained largely unexamined. Although the city discouraged people from living right up against the city walls,6 its area and influence extended beyond those walls. The original area of city was the peninsula and the strip of land called Horegenbeke in front of the Burgtor, the gate at the northern end of the peninsula. In the fourteenth century Lübeck secured its area, called the Landwehr, with a large ditch, which, combined with natural rivers and streams, provided a barrier to access to the Landwehr.7 Many little villages started out as property of the city in 1262, but most were alienated into private hands and 2
Erich Hoffmann, “Lübeck im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter: Die große Zeit Lübecks,” in Antjekathrin Graßmann, ed., Lübeckische Geschichte (Lübeck: Schmidt Römhild, 1988), 306. 3 LUB, 10: 651. 4 Margrit Christensen-Streckebach and Michael Scheftel, “Kleinhausbebauung in Lübeck im 16. Jahrhundert. Zusammenhänge zwischen Eigentumsentwicklung und Baustruktur,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für lübeckische Geschichte und Altertumskunde 63 (1983): 168-169. 5 Rainer Andresen, Lübeck. Geschichte der Wohngänge (Lübeck: Verlag Lübecker Rundschau, 1985), vol. 5. 6 A document from 1465 expressly forbids people from living in houses outside the city walls. LUB, 10: 651. 7 Hoffmann, “Lübeck,” 302.
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became holdings (Güter).8 Many of these holdings were owned by citizens of Lübeck who looked on the purchase of land as a secure investment; the land was cultivated by the people who lived in the villages. The influence of Lübeck was therefore extensive in the area of the Landwehr and beyond.9 The picture of Lübeck’s gardens is partially derived from records of land transactions preserved in a collection of documents, the Lübeckische Urkundenbücher (LUB),10 dating from 1270 to 1470.11 The 8
Julius Hartwig, “Die Rechtsverhältnisse des ländlichen Grundbesitzes im Gebiet der freien und Hansestadt Lübeck,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für lübeckische Geschichte und Altertumskunde 9 (1) (1908): 209-212. 9 Hartwig, “Die Rechtsverhältnisse,” 278. 10 Carl Wehrmann, ed., Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (Vol. 1), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 1 (Lübeck: Friedrich Aschenfeldt, 1843); Carl Wehrmann, ed., Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (vol. 2.1), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, vol. 2.1 (Lübeck: Friedrich Aschenfeldt, 1858); Carl Wehrmann, ed., Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (vol. 2.2), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 2.2 (Lübeck: Friedrich Aschenfeldt, 1858); Carl Wehrmann, ed., Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (vol. 3), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 3 (Lübeck: Ferdinand Grautoff, 1871); Carl Wehrmann, ed., Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (vol. 4), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 4 (Lübeck: Ferdinand Grautoff, 1873); Carl Wehrmann, ed., Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (vol. 5), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 5 (Lübeck: Ferdinand Grautoff, 1877); Carl Wehrmann, ed. Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (vol. 6), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 6 (Lübeck: Ferdinand Grautoff, 1881); Carl Wehrmann, ed., Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (vol. 7), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 7 (Lübeck: Ferdinand Grautoff, 1885); Carl Wehrmann, ed., Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (vol. 8), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 8 (Lübeck: Edmund Schmersahl, 1889); Carl Wehrmann, ed., Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (vol. 9), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 9 (Lübeck: Edmund Schmersahl, 1893); Carl Wehrmann and Paul Hasse, eds., Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (vol. 10), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 10 (Lübeck: Edmund Schmersahl Nachf., 1898); Paul Hasse, ed., Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (vol. 11), Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 11 (Lübeck: Lübcke & Nöhring, 1905); Friedrich Techen, Wort- und Sachregister zu Band 1-11, Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch, Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde (Lübeck: Verlag des Vereins für Lübeckische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 1932). 11 Many of the documents preserved in the LUB are derived from the Oberstadtbücher and the Niederstadtbücher. The Oberstadtbuch was a record of transactions of movements of property, mortgages and rents within and, to some extent, outside the city of Lübeck. H. Bickelmann, “Oberstadtbücher,” Kanzlei Findbuch (Lübeck: Archiv der Hansestadt Lübeck, n.d.), 9. By far the most common source of these documents is the Niederstadtbuch, a record of all sorts of transactions between citizens of Lübeck. While it began as a record of debt
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usually indicate land use, as well as the identity of the person paying the tithes, the owner, if different from the payer, and often the previous owner or payer. The location of the garden in relation to the gardens of others and to local landmarks also appears. The tithe records usually provide the amount at which the land was tithed. Because of details about ownership, crop and location, it is in many cases possible to establish when the same garden has been tithed in two or more of the documents. Both tithe and land transaction records indicate that fruit, cabbages and hops were grown in gardens around Lübeck on land owned, rented or mortgaged by its citizens. The almost 200 years’ worth of records contained in the Wette garden books provide some useful information on production gardens in Lübeck. They confirm the impression given in other written records that there were many gardens just outside the city walls. Whereas the records in the Niederstadtbücher and the Oberstadtbücher deal mainly with transactions between individuals, and the tithe records are concerned with payments to ecclesiastical authorities, the Wette garden books tell us of the gardens on which rent was paid to the city. Most of these gardens were located outside the city walls to the west and south of the city. Payments on approximately 500 pieces of land are recorded in the first book, while the second and third contain records of about 250 and about 300, respectively. These gardens must have been a significant source of revenue for the city. Analysis of the records concerning the Soltewisch, an area of land outside the Holsten wall, on the west side of the city, reveals that while there was a great range in amount of rent paid, from four schillinge to 96 schillinge, the amount paid for an individual area remained almost constant over almost 200 years. When both the amount of rent and the area was recorded, four schillinge per piece was the usual amount. Most payers were men, with some women appearing as well. Most people’s occupations were not given. The Wette garden books provide a good general picture of a ring of gardens around the city, but none of the entries contains detailed information about crops. The title page of the second book, however, states that it covers hop gardens and gardens (hoppen höve und garden).17 A leaf inserted into the second garden book 17
AHL HS 289, Ar.
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backs up this assertion, since it is labeled “Van den Hoppenlande” and concerns the four pieces of hop land and a hof owned by Tileke Warendorp, the proceeds of which she wishes to go to a brotherhood after her death.18 This emphasis on hops tallies well with the information gleaned from other documentary sources. While the documents that provide the bulk of data for this analysis indicate that hops dominated garden production in Lübeck, the regulations of the gardeners’ guild, known as the Willkür der Gärtner, amplify the list of crops.19 These regulations cover many aspects of the life of the guild and its members, including admission of new members, sale of produce, cultivation of produce, land management, fencing, wages, and transportation, among others. The Willkür provides a very important link between evidence for production (tithe records, and records of land transactions involving gardens) and consumption (archaeological data). The document is a prescriptive one, and it gives rules of behavior for the gardeners of Lübeck, although the definition of a gardener never appears. Some of its regulations refer specifically to certain produce. For example, it did not allow people to sell produce on the area at their gardens, other than cress and sage.20 Possibly the authorities wanted to avoid a situation in which large-scale food marketing was taking place outside of the central marketplace, where it could be more closely regulated. However, it also stated that turnips, carrots, krickelmoren,21 red cabbage and green vegetables should be sold bi
18
AHL HS 289, loose leaf between fols. 7v and 8r. LUB, 3: 771. Undated. 20 The words used in the document are kerszen and saluyen. Lübben translates kerszen as Kresse, or nasturtium (August Lübben, completed by Christoph Walther, Mittelniederdeutsches Handwörterbuch (Norden and Leipzig: Diedr. Soltau’s Verlag, 1888), 2: 54). Nasturtium officinale, or Rorippa nasturtiumaquaticum, is the hairless creeping perennial known as water cress, which grows in shallow fresh water and mud (David McClintock and R. S. R. Fitter, The Pocket Guide to Wildflowers (London: Reprint Society, 1955), 20-1). Lübben does not provide a definition for saluyen, nor do others, such as C. Schumann, “Beiträge zur lübeckischen Volkskunde. Pflanzennamen,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Lübeckische Geschichte und Altertumskunde 5.4 (1891): 59-63; 78-80; 90-4. I am assuming that it refers to Salbei, or sage. 21 The document also lists a vegetable called krickelmoren, which would seem to mean something like crooked carrots, but I have not been able to identify this vegetable more closely. It could be the wild parsnip, which appears in the archaeological record of Lübeck. Körber-Grohne notes that the names of both these vegetables were often used interchangeably in the Middle Ages, for 19
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sik, which one would presume to mean from one’s house. This suggests that the gardeners lived within the city walls, and were permitted to sell two types of vegetables at their gardens, a greater number from their houses, and also could sell from a stall in the market. It is unclear whether one individual would be engaged in all three activities. Gardeners were not permitted to sell seed if it would be of use to the guild, and were not allowed to plant onion seed at all. No reason for this last stipulation appears. These regulations also make it clear that some gardeners were involved in some processing of their produce. One section of the regulations deals with the smoking of garlic. Garlic was to be smoked for nine days, and could not be brought out of the house without being inspected by one of the masters of the guild. The document is interesting not only in that it tells us how various vegetables were treated, but also in that it adds to the list of plants we know were cultivated in and around Lübeck. The vegetables listed here may be the ones grown in the so-called cabbage gardens. These are onions (cypollen), garlic (knuflok), turnips (roven), carrots (moren), red cabbage (roden kol), and green vegetables (groene warmoos).22 This document is important in another sense, because it provides a link between sources on production, such as the ones being examined in this chapter, and the archaeological evidence for consumption. It is one of the very few early documents that proves that people in Lübeck sold produce to other people in Lübeck. It is one of the very few early documents that proves that people in Lübeck sold produce to other people in Lübeck. This document forbade anyone to have more than one stall in the market during Christmas and at Easter, and thus shows us that gardeners cultivating produce outside the city brought it into the city for the purposes of commerce. All of the records examined here demonstrate that there were plots of land called gardens by the people who kept records. The gardens that appear in these records are located just outside the walls of the city and in the villages of the surrounding Landwehr.
example in the Physica of Hildegard of Bingen. Udelgard Körber-Grohne, Nutzpflanzen in Deutschland. Kulturgeschichte und Biologie (Stuttgart: Theiss Verlag, 1994), 225. 22 LUB, 3: 771.
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Citizens of Lübeck, men and women, members of the city elite and artisans, were engaged in paying tithes on them, paying rents from them to the city, and engaging in various other transactions involving them. They ranged in size from small to large; an absolute determination of size is not possible. The primary crop of these gardens was hops; these records also mention apples, cabbages and berries. Tithe records show that items grown in gardens changed over time, and that some gardens went out of production and became bleaching grounds. The Wette garden books show that the average income paid to the city from gardens outside the city walls remained fairly constant throughout the approximately 200-year period covered by these records. Questions regularly asked by agrarian historians will generally go unanswered by the available documents concerning Lübeck gardens. Little quantitative material is available, and no records that allow us to calculate the productivity of these gardens or to assess if crop rotation took place. Hops and fruit trees obviously do not lend themselves well to such farming systems. The tithe records show that land use did change over time; the reasons behind these changes are not clear, but could have been made based on analysis of prices. Figures for hop and cabbage prices during the fifteenth century are unfortunately not available. The documents also do not specify cultivation techniques; one must assume again that hard work with a shovel and hoe was the primary method of cultivation. While records concerning gardens in Lübeck do not address well the use of technology, crop rotations or yields of these parcels of land, they do reveal that plots of largely unknown size, often called gardens, existed outside the city walls and were cultivated for both industrial and food crops. They appear to have been a normal part of the life of the city and its inhabitants. While the Wette garden books, the tithe records, and records involving land transactions provide much useful information, they deal almost exclusively with issues of production. For information on consumption, archaeological evidence is an excellent source. Much of the evidence for consumption of garden produce in Lübeck is derived from archaeological evidence. Documentary evidence rarely identifies a plant to the species level; written sources are also generally quiet about food sources that are gathered rather than grown. Archaeological sources lack information on production, such as where and on whose land the plant was grown.
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Thus a comparative approach to both kinds of evidence provides the fullest possible picture. In the case of Lübeck, most of the botanical finds come from cesspits and wells. Cesspits in particular provide evidence for consumption, since they are collecting points for both human and kitchen waste.23 Although preservation condition in cesspits are usually good, the plant material found there can be damaged by mastication, processing as foodstuffs (e.g., milling of grain) and the action of the human digestive system. Fruit stones are usually very well-preserved in cesspits, and can give insight into changes in the species consumed over centuries, as well as giving an indication of when new species were introduced into the diet. These new species can either be imported fruits, or fruit newly going into local cultivation.24 An awareness of what is likely to survive in the damp conditions of a filled-in well or cesspit is necessary to a meaningful analysis of these plant remains. Pollen grains, seed, wood, and fruit-stones are the most resilient to rot, and are therefore most likely to survive. Root, stem and leaf fragments are much less likely to survive, although some interesting work has been done on identification of waterlogged specimens.25 Grains, legumes, and leaf and root vegetables are rarely well-preserved.26 The material recovered in Lübeck is almost entirely made up of seeds and fruit-stones. It would be incorrect to assume, however, that these seeds give an accurate representation of all the plants grown in these areas. Although no plant remains of the genus Allium, to which belong onions, leeks and garlic, were found, the Willkür states that these were grown in Lübeck. Thus comparison of lists of plants found in digs and lists of plants mentioned in contemporary documents could prove very illuminating.
23
Karl-Heinz Knörzer, “Aussagemöglichkeiten von paläoethnobotanischen Latrinenuntersuchungen,” in W. van Zeist and W. A. Casparie, eds., Plants and Ancient Man. Studies in Palaeoethnobotany (Rotterdam, Boston: A. A. Balkema, 1984), 331-8. 24 Knörzer, “Aussagemöglichkeiten,” 331. 25 P. R. Tomlinson, “Vegetative Plant Remains from Waterlogged Deposits Identified at York,” in Jane M. Renfrew, ed., New Light on Early Farming. Recent Developments in Palaeoethnobotany (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 109. 26 Knörzer, “Aussagemöglichkeiten,” 333-6.
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Another consideration to keep in mind when examining the results of palaeobotanical analysis is the use of the plant, and their relative number of seeds. The seeds of plants that are used for those seeds (hazel or poppy, for example) will survive in greater numbers than the seeds of plants used for their leaves or roots, like cabbage or carrots. Similarly, seeds of fruits that have their seeds embedded in them and are therefore part of the package will also make their way into cesspits at a greater rate; examples of such fruits are strawberries (Fragaria vesca), cherries (Prunus avium), and damsons (Prunus insititia). Another consideration is the number of seeds produced by each fruit. A single cherry produces one stone, while a single fig can produce thousands of seeds. It is clear, therefore, that direct correlations between botanical macro-remains and the type and number of plants consumed in the area cannot be established through excavation. One must always keep in mind the plant remains that may have been excreted or thrown into the cesspit, but which rotted or sprouted; the plants which were used before they set seed; and the plants which produce many seeds per fruit. Despite these caveats, results of palaeobotanical work can be very informative, particularly when they are used in conjunction with documentary sources. Excavations in Lübeck have taken place in a range of sites located in areas of differing socio-economic status within the cities. The data derived from these excavations therefore permit commentary on the types of plants found, as well as analysis of change over time. The data also enable comparison of plant consumption by three socio-economic groups: artisan, ecclesiastical, and merchant/ seafarer. A detailed look at species found in Lübeck reveals the diversity of plants grown and consumed in, and presumably, outside the city. A closer look at the distribution of these species may shed more light on the effects of social class on food consumption in the city. The following sites are of particular importance, either because they contained numerous species or an unusual combination of species: St. Johanniskloster, Hundestrasse, and Alfstrasse/Schüsselbuden.27 These three sites contained the highest number of species. Each of the three also represents a different socio-economic category: ecclesiastical, artisanal and mercantile, respectively. Throughout the Mid27
See Tables 1 and 2 for more details.
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dle Ages, Lübeck’s inhabitants seem to have lived mainly with their own kind. Merchants and seafarers lived on the western half of the peninsula, nearer the harbor. The bishop and chapter occupied the southern end of the peninsula, while the artisans resided in the eastern area, with some members living in the southeastern area towards the Trave.28
St. Johanniskloster St. Johanniskloster was located on the eastern side of the peninsula and occupied about two hectares. The monastery was founded in the years after 1173; it began as a Benedictine house, but the Benedictine monks were replaced by Cistercians in 1256 as a result, apparently, of poor discipline.29 The monastery was dissolved in 1574. The botanically-analyzed samples date from the beginning of the thirteenth century, during the so-called second settlement period (Siedlungsperiode II). The excavation took place between 1979 and 1983, as a result of a planned extension of a nearby building.30 The results indicate that use of the site intensified during the first third of the thirteenth century.31 A new well was built during this period. It has been dendrochronologically dated to around 1211. The monks also built a water channel, carrying water from the Wakenitz for workshops, washing and garden; the channel was two meters deep and roofed over. Gläser notes that a layer of humusypeaty soil, dating to this period, was found towards the southern end of the area. Because the soil had the smell and texture of garden soil and contained a number of holes from stakes, he postulated that a garden was cultivated there.32 The botanical evidence seems to support this conclusion. 28 Rolf Hammel, “Räumliche Entwicklung und Berufstopographie Lübecks bis zum Ende des 14. Jahrhunderts,” in Graßmann, Lübeckische Geschichte, 64-70. 29 Manfred Gläser, “Archäologische und baugeschichtliche Untersuchungen im St. Johanniskloster zu Lübeck,” Lübecker Schriften zur Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte 16 (1989): 11. 30 Gläser, “Archäologische,” 10. 31 Manfred Gläser, “Die Ausgrabungen auf dem Gelände des ehemaligen St. Johannisklosters in Lübeck,” Lübecker Schriften zur Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte 17 (1988): 118. 32 Gläser, “Archäologische,” 17.
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Eighteen species of edible, possibly cultivated plants appear in the data from St. Johanniskloster. Hops are the only beer-brewing plant. Hemp and flax are both found, as are the vegetables Brassica oleracea/napus, B. nigra/rapa, carrot (Daucus carota), wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) and celery (Apium graveolens). Parsley (Petroselinum crispum) and hazelnut (Corylus avellana) also appear. Fruits are well-represented, with a total of seven species. Most, if not all, of these fruits are those that could be either cultivated or gathered, such as raspberry (Rubus idaeus), elderberry (Sambucus nigra) and wood strawberry (Fragaria vesca), to choose those with the highest seed count. This range of finds, dating from the thirteenth century, gives the impression of a diet that was based on local crops with not much variation of vegetable matter. No exotic fruits or spices appear. Alsleben finds it surprising that herbs such as fennel, dill, coriander and caraway do not appear in the botanical finds from St. Johanniskloster.33 This does not tally with the stereotypical image of the monastery garden as described in some literature.34 It is also in contrast with the gold and silver cutlery found on the same site dating from the same period.35 No documentary record of the cultivation of this garden in the monastery has been preserved; such a record would provide a valuable source with which to contrast the archaeological plant remains from this site. The clergy in the thirteenth century do not appear to have eaten more luxuriously than their artisan brethren residing in Hundestrasse in the same period; indeed that evidence shows a wider range of species. Hundestrasse Finds from Hundestrasse, in the artisans’ quarter, are rich and occur over a relatively long span. They have been dated to five different periods: thirteenth century; before or around 1300, fourteenth century; fourteenth to fifteenth century; and before 1615. Twenty-one species, derived from six samples, appear in the botani33 Almuth Alsleben, “Archäobotanische Untersuchungen in der Hansestadt Lübeck. Landschaftsentwicklung im städtischen Umfeld und Nahrungswirtschaft während des Mittelalters bis in die frühe Neuzeit,” Offa 48 (1991): 357. 34 See, for example, Sylvia Landsberg’s discussion of the monastery garden in The Medieval Garden (London: British Museum Press, n.d.), 34-44. 35 Alsleben, “Archäobotanische,” 360.
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cal record from Hundestrasse in the thirteenth century. The number of individual items found is also high, numbering 1067. The material from this period, particularly from samples 781 and 832, both rich in organic matter, was quite well-preserved. As in the previous site, hops, flax and two types of Brassica appear. The oil seeds gold of pleasure (Camelina sativa) and poppy (Papaver somniferum) are added. There are no vegetables, but the legumes pea (Pisum sativum) and broad bean (Vicia faba) are preserved. Caraway (Carum carvi) and either fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) or dill (Anethum graveolens) were found. Hazelnuts (Corylus avellana) also appear. The range of fruit is wider than at St. Johanniskloster, with some of the same possibly wild species appearing, such as raspberry, strawberry and blueberry. Additions are blackberry, pear, apple, and sweet cherry. While it is likely that blackberries were gathered from the wild, or grew at the edges of the garden, the other three species were likely cultivated on trees on site. Grape seeds, perhaps from imported raisins, perhaps grown locally, appear as well, along with figs, an unequivocally imported fruit. A slightly later sample, deriving from a fecal layer, was dated to before or around 1300. Fourteen species appeared here, with a total of 322 items. One hop fragment was found. Species not represented in the material from the earlier period are the sloe (Prunus spinosa), the European plum (P. domestica) and dill (Anethum graveolens). European plum is not found from any other period in Hundestrasse. One find of hops appears, and none of any vegetable. The only oilseed crop is the poppy. Nine of the species are fruit; as in the other periods, hazelnut appears as well. Thirty-two species were identified from the fourteenth century, from a total of 23 samples, most of which were derived from one cesspit at Hundestrasse 9. Many of the finds are similar to those of the previous two periods. However, legumes are represented in the fourteenth century only by a lone lentil. Parsley and celery appear, as do coriander and positively identified dill. New among fruits are elderberry (Sambucus nigra), lingonberry (Vaccinium cf. vitis-idaea), sour cherry (P. cerasus), damson plum (P. insititia) and mulberry (Morus nigra). Numbers among other fruit finds are generally higher than for the previous periods. For example, 431 fig seeds were found, as opposed to 76 for the thirteenth century and 200 circa 1300, while the numbers for strawberry are 910, whereas previously these had been 523 and 28. These larger numbers may be
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a result of the large number of samples taken from a cesspit that provided excellent preservation conditions. The smallest number of species derives from one sample, from a humus layer, dated to the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. They number three, and one item from each species was identified. One linseed, one poppyseed, and one stone from a damson plum appear here. Our last evidence comes from one sample taken from Hundestrasse 17; it is dated to before 1615 and contained fifteen species. No species were found that had not been unearthed in earlier samples. No hops appear here. The only vegetable to appear is the brassica; representing herbs are fennel and coriander. Fruits are much better-represented, with raspberry, blackberry, sweet and sour cherry, apple, pear, blueberry and fig. It is quite possible that this narrowing of species says more about preservation conditions than it does about changes in cultivation or consumption in this area; hard fruit seeds are more likely to survive worse conditions than are thinner-walled herb and vegetable seeds. Van Haaster states that the sample came from a cultural layer from the fifth period of building on the site, but does not provide more details about conditions favorable or unfavorable to preservation.36 At any rate, unlike the material from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it does not appear to have derived from fecal material or a cesspit. Another reason for the smaller number of species may be that the material dated to before 1615 comes from one sample, whereas the material with the larger number of species from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is derived from six and 23 samples respectively. It is not surprising that Hundestrasse provided more species than St. Johanniskloster, since many more samples, over a longer time span, make up the evidence here. The difference in the number of species between the thirteenth-century samples from each is three, and shows that plant material consumed and cultivated in these two gardens was similar. The one surprise consists of the fact that fig seeds were found on the artisan site and not the ecclesiasti36 Doris Mührenberg, “Archäologische und baugeschichtliche Untersuchungen im Handwerkerviertel zu Lübeck Befunde Hundestrasse 9-17. Mit einem botanischen Beitrag zu den spätmittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Pflanzenresten von Henk van Haaster,” Lübecker Schriften zur Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte 16 (1989): 271.
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cal, which runs contrary to the assumption that the clergy had a higher standard of living than artisans. Indeed, Hundestrasse 9 was a foundation in which poor people lived, from 1358 to the eighteenth century; Wilhelm von Warendorp left the house in his will to the poor in 1358.37 The richness of the finds seems to attest, however, to a high standard of living.38 These finds may have been deposited earlier in the century, or may show that a diet rich in fruit and vegetables was accessible to all socio- economic strata. An examination of the documentary evidence, conducted below, will show that those who owned these properties were not necessarily from an impecunious social order. The general excavations undertaken at Hundestrasse 9-17 can be helpful in assessing who lived and worked on these lots. Doris Mührenberg drew the following conclusions from the excavations.39 First, she notes that the land was increasingly divided and built up over time. The first building went up in the first half of the thirteenth century, and a fence divided the land into two parcels. At the end of the thirteenth century a house with three wings was built on the lots later numbered 13-17. In the west wing the archaeologists found a pit containing many bones and half-finished combs. She therefore concludes that a boneworker who specialized in combs lived and worked here. Timo Wobes, a butcher, lived in 15/17 in 1293.40 By the end of the fourteenth century, a house made of stone had been built on each piece of land, facing onto the street. Barrels, of the type used by leather workers, date to this period, and Mührenberg suggests that a shoemaker worked here. Stephan states that Nicholas Cuper, a rosarymaker, lived in Hundestrasse 13 in 1401.41 In the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries wings reaching back into the lot were built out from the houses. The lots were divided from one another with brick walls. Evidence from number 15 suggests the activities of a smith. Material from number
37 Hans-Georg Stephan, “Archäologische Ausgrabungen im Handwerkerviertel der Hansestadt Lübeck (Hundestrasse 9-17)—ein Vorbericht,” Lübecker Schriften zur Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte 1 (1978): 78. 38 Van Haaster in Mührenberg, “Archäologische,” 278. 39 Doris Mührenberg, “Der Markt zu Lübeck. Ergebnisse archäologischer Untersuchungen,” Lübecker Schriften zur Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte 23 (1993): 98-101. 40 Stephan, “Archäologische,” 78. 41 Stephan, “Archäologische,” 78.
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17 from the seventeenth century suggests a textile worker lived and worked here. Hammel’s study of the Oberstadtbuchregesten reveals much about the ownership and residence of houses in Lübeck from 1284 from 1600, the period in which they were kept.42 His examination of Hundestrasse adds to our understanding of its social composition. Hundestrasse was divided into an eastern and a western part by the cross street Rosengarten-Tünkenhagen.43 During the first half of the fourteenth century, the eastern half was characterized by a concentration of leatherworkers, while the western half contained owners of more mixed professions, such as two bakers, eight butchers, two chandlers, a rosary-maker and a carpenter.44 Ownership by council families was lower here than on any other street he studied.45 The intellectual occupations were represented by two magistri, both of whom lived in the western half of the street. In the second half of the century, the dominance of the leatherworkers in the eastern half continued, but their numbers were reduced to 11 from 21.46 In the western half, the number of houses owned by artisans went from 25 to 15, while the number owned by council families went from 10 to 15. The artisans who remained as owners on the street belonged to the occupations of apothecary, butcher, rosary-maker, goldsmith, carpenter, and smith, among others.47 Hammel has developed and analyzed a list of owners of Hundestrasse 9-17.48 He classifies all owners during the second half of the fourteenth century as belonging to what he terms social level III, except for the owner of number 11, who belonged to social level I.49 According to Hammel, social level I consisted of merchants and other people of status, while social level III was made up of the artisanal middle class, especially those from guilds of about 1350 masters. It also 42
Rolf Hammel, “Hauseigentum im spätmittelalterlichen Lübeck. Methoden zur sozial- und wirtschaftsgeschichtlichen Auswertung der Lübecker Oberstadtbuchregesten,” Lübecker Schriften zur Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte 10 (1987): 85-300. 43 Hammel, “Hauseigentum,” 209. 44 Hammel, “Hauseigentum,” 212. 45 Hammel, “Hauseigentum,” 211. These streets were: Schüsselbuden, Fischstraße, Holstenstraße, Braunstraße, An der Untertrave 96-114/115. 46 Hammel, “Hauseigentum,” 212, 213. 47 Hammel, “Hauseigentum,” 213. 48 Hammel, “Hauseigentum,” 276. 49 Hammel, Abbildung, 77, 389.
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included some trades with no guild, such as porters.50 This is consistent with his characterization of the street as mainly made up of members of social level three, with some representation from council families.51 The archaeological evidence presented by Mührenberg and van Haaster and the documentary evidence by Hammel are quite consistent with one another. Each confirms the other’s assessment of when the lots began to be built up. The butcher, who owned the house in the first half of the fourteenth century, may have made combs from the bones left over from his trade, or may have leased premises and supplied bones to a specialist. While the guesses of occupation made by Mührenberg do not correspond well to those of the owners in Hammel’s work, we must keep in mind that those who owned the houses did not necessarily live in them. Mührenberg’s guesses are, moreover, guesses; her supposition that a leather- worker plied his trade at this end of the street does not seem to be borne out by Hammel’s findings. Both Mührenberg and Hammel suggest that those who resided in Hundestrasse were artisans and mainly belonged to the artisanal middle class. If that supposition is true, the botanical evidence allows us to suggest that the residents of Hundestrasse 9-17 enjoyed a varied diet of fruit, herbs and vegetables, most of which were indigenous and some of which appear to have been collected from surrounding wild spaces. They also enjoyed the fig, an imported fruit. The inexactitude of both documentary and archaeological evidence does not allow us to conclude who, and of what occupation, consumed what.
Alfstrasse/Schüsselbuden We now cross from the eastern side of the city to the western, the so-called merchant-seafarer section. Schüsselbuden is the street on the western side of the market, facing it, while Alfstrasse runs east-west from the market down to the Trave. Alfstrasse/Schüsselbuden provides rich botanical evidence from the thirteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The earliest samples are derived 50 51
Hammel, “Hauseigentum,” 130. Hammel, “Hauseigentum,” 218.
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from a rubbish pit, while the later samples are taken from two wells. Alsleben, who performed the botanical analysis, is not specific about their exact location in relation to the modern house numbers.52 Twenty-eight species are attested from the thirteenth century, from a total of four samples. Hops, sweet gale and cannabis all appear. Vegetables are represented by the brassicas and white mustard, legumes by broad bean and another lone lentil. The oil seeds are gold of pleasure and linseed. The one herb is fennel. The almost ubiquitous hazel comes as no surprise. Fifteen fruit species appear here, including the wild, and assumed gathered, raspberry, blackberry, strawberry, elder, and sloe. Among the cultivated fruits are apple, pear, grape, sweet cherry and damson plum, both a generic variety and type C.53 One fig seed makes an appearance. Two species that have not been seen before in Hundestrasse or St. Johanniskloster were found here. The first is hawthorn (Crataegus oxyacanthus), found on few other sites. It appears for all periods for this site, arguing that a hawthorn tree grew on the property. The second is walnut (Juglans regia), found only at Alfstrasse/ Schüsselbuden, the tower of the Heiligen-Geist-Hospital, and Engelsgrube. The largest numbers are found at the probable site of a bakery in Engelsgrube. Four samples taken from a well and dating to the fifteenth century offer the largest number of species preserved at any one
52
Alsleben, “Archäobotanische,” 333. The damson plum (P. insititia) originated in the East as offspring of the sloe (Prunus spinosa) and the cherry plum (Prunus cerasifera). The European plum developed in the same way, and together they form a varied group of plums. Helmut Kroll, “Mittelalterlich-frühneuzeitliche Steinobst aus Lübeck,” Lübecker Schriften zur Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte 3 (1980): 167. This variation has led Behre to develop a classification system for the damson plum, based on shape, surface features, measurement and indices, and using his finds from Haithabu and Alt Lübeck as samples. Karl-Ernst Behre, “Formenkreise von Prunus domestica L. von der Wikingerzeit bis in die frühe Neuzeit nach Fruchtsteinen aus Haithabu und Alt-Schleswig,” Berichte der deutschen botanischen Gesellschaft 91 (1978): 161-79. His original system contained four classifications, from A to D. Kroll, noticing a great deal of variation in the C-type among the examples he was finding at Lübeck, extended the system to six types, A to F. This classification system enables palaeobotanists to distinguish minutely between types. Kroll, “Mittelalterlich- frühneuzeitliche,” 168. 53
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site, namely 46. Many of the species dating from the thirteenth century also appear here. New to this site are poppy, carrot, wild parsnip (these last two seen in St. Johanniskloster in the thirteenth century and not at all in Hundestrasse), parsley, dill, caraway, and coriander. The brassicas appear again, but there are no legumes. Once more, hazel appears. The site contains a very wide range of fruit species (25), of both wild and cultivated types. Many of these are common to other sites, such as blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, sloe, blueberry, and sweet cherry. European dewberry we have not seen since St. Johanniskloster. Pear species, apple species and the damson plum variants B, C, E and F were found here as well. Fig, with the highest seed count of any site (497), and grape are represented, as are the more unusual walnut and mulberry. On this site we have the first appearance of what may be quince (Cydonia sp.). The last site to be examined offers somewhat less diversity of species, but presents some hitherto unseen in Lübeck. This site also offers large preserved numbers of individual species. Hops, cannabis, the brassicas, poppy, caraway, coriander and fennel come as no surprise. Some of the spices preserved on this site are, however, unique to it. Grains of paradise (Afromomum melegueta), black pepper (Piper nigrum) and cardamom (Elleteria cardamomum) are all tropical spices that must have been imported.54 Dyer’s camomile (Anthemis tinctoria) is seen here for the first time since St. Johanniskloster. Many of the fruit species preserved here, which number 27, echo those preserved elsewhere. In some cases the number of preserved finds is unusually high. Some examples are sloe (411), sweet cherry (2079), and grape (1342). These numbers are many times higher than the next-highest find from other sites. All variants of damson plum appear here; the largest finds are of the variants B, C and F, which Kroll points out are probably local, since they are the variants least suited to drying.55 A second quince find appears on this site. Two species of fruit preserved nowhere else appear here. They are the peach (Prunus persica) and the medlar (Mespilus germanica), the former likely imported, the latter a rarely consumed local fruit. 54 A document from 26 July 1467 reports the arrest of a spice merchant from Nymwegen. His wife was petitioning the council in order to have his wares released to her. LUB, 11: 266. Unfortunately, none of the spices were named. 55 Kroll, “Mittelalterlich-frühneuzeitliche,” 168-9.
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In general, the botanical evidence from Alfstrasse/Schüsselbuden contains a good diversity of preserved species. Much of this diversity is exhibited in the fruit finds. Both a wider diversity of indigenous fruits, and some non-indigenous introductions contribute to this picture. The picture presented by the finds from the thirteenth century does not differ markedly from that we derive from the finds for the same century at Hundestrasse and St. Johanniskloster. Certainly some species that were found in Alfstrasse/Schüsselbuden did not appear in the other two sites for the same century, such as lentil, fennel, sloe, hawthorn, pear and walnut. However, the situation is reversed in the case of carrot (found in St. Johanniskloster) and pea (Hundestrasse). The appearance of the walnut, which was perhaps imported, may suggest access to more expensive foodstuffs; figs, also imported, were consumed at both Hundestrasse and Alfstrasse/Schüsselbuden. More fruit species are preserved at the latter site than at the other two; all but two are species that one may assume grew in Lübeck. These differences do not seem illustrative of a significantly higher standard of living, as measured in food consumption, in Alfstrasse/Schüsselbuden in the thirteenth century. Evidence from the later two centuries at Alfstrasse/Schüsselbuden offers much more support for such a claim. Both these sets of samples offer a greater diversity of species than the roughly -comparable, in terms of date, samples from Hundestrasse. Part of this disparity may be explained by the superior preservation conditions offered for this period in Alfstrasse/Schüsselbuden.56 However, when we examine the samples taken from similar preservation conditions in Hundestrasse, we note that a lower number of species was preserved. This may be attributable to the earlier time period (fourteenth century) and also to the different socio-economic conditions. Even more telling than this greater diversity of species is the presence of those hitherto unattested in Lübeck. These species are all exotic and quite probably imported. The first, quince, appears in the fifteenth century; by the sixteenth, the number has risen to five, and six if we count the quince finds also attested for this century. This evidence suggests that the range of foods available in
56 The Alfstrasse/Schüsselbuden samples were taken from a well and were high in organic content; those from Hundestrasse were less numerous (one per period) and derived from soil less favourable to preservation.
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Lübeck was changing as exotic foods made their way north (this does not explain why figs were accessible in the artisanal quarter as early as the thirteenth century) and that the wealthier members of society had access to them first. The large number of finds for this century may also suggest commercial activity in that very site dealing in foodstuffs, since the ordinary consumption of a household might not produce quite so many fruit stones. The position of the lot, on the corner of Alfstrasse, which ran straight down to the harbor, makes this hypothesis perfectly possible. Unfortunately, Hammel’s study of house ownership is not as useful for this site as it was for Hundestrasse. His study took in the houses along Schüsselbuden, but did not extend down Alfstrasse, and he focused on the fourteenth century, a period not covered by the archaeological evidence presented here. Some of his general remarks on the socio-economic nature of Schüsselbuden may be illuminating, however. Schüsselbuden faced onto the market. Permanent market stalls were built in front of the houses and separated from them by a large passage. In the early fourteenth century, there was a preponderance of owners from council families. By the second half of that century, the balance had shifted, with more than half of the owners being artisans. No one profession was dominant.57 These artisans were concentrated at the south end of the street, south of number 16.58 The house at the corner of Alfstrasse was number 6. Hammel is doubtful whether the owners necessarily pursued their occupations from these buildings; he is able to say definitively that the goldsmith in number 12 did not, since goldsmiths were restricted to the 12 stalls underneath the arcade of the Rathaus.59 Hammel also notes that merchants were concentrated in the northern end of the street, and that the two corner lots at Mengstrasse and Alfstrasse were conveniently oriented both to the Marienkirche (the church of the merchants) and to the harbor.60 His map for 1350 to 1399 shows a tinsmith at Schüsselbuden 8, and also a tanner. Both these professions are derived from the last names of the owner.61
57 58 59 60 61
Hammel, Hammel, Hammel, Hammel, Hammel,
“Hauseigentum,” “Hauseigentum,” “Hauseigentum,” “Hauseigentum,” “Hauseigentum,”
197. 198. 197. 198. diagram 73.
594
CHARLOTTE MASEMANN
No occupation names appear in the map for 1284 to 1349. Hammel’s work certainly does not preclude the presence of a relatively wealthy merchant on this corner lot, but it does not confirm it either. Dumitrache and Remann refer to imported material found on the site that suggests the presence of a wealthy merchant; this includes glazed ceramics in Dutch, Danish and English styles. Unfortunately, because they do not discuss this evidence in detail, it remains suggestive.62 This closer look at the evidence from sites in three different socio-economic areas of the city is revealing. It shows that a wide range of fruits and vegetables were consumed on all three sites. Little disparity exists in the evidence from the thirteenth century on all three sites, suggesting that the standard of living at that time was fairly consistent across social levels. The St. Johanniskloster site does not present later evidence. Some of the evidence from St. Johanniskloster and Hundestrasse was slightly surprising. Archaeologists found very little herb evidence in an area thought to be a monastery garden; one would expect herbs to be plentiful in this area, in light of documentary evidence from other sites. This anomaly may be due to preservation conditions or the fact that the leaves of many herbs dried and used, rather than their seeds. The monastery gardeners therefore would have had an incentive to see that their leafy herbs did not go to seed. Evidence from Hundestrasse also presents something of a puzzle. Material found from the thirteenth century to before 1615 shows a consistently wide range of plant material, including fig seeds that must have been imported. This appears on a site that was known to be the home of a poorhouse. This evidence suggests that the poor may have been eating rather better than one assumes. Documentary evidence shows that the residents of Hundestrasse were primarily middle-class artisans; the archaeological evidence suggests that this class of person ate a varied diet of locally available produce. Material from Alfstrasse/Schüsselbuden dating from the thirteenth century does not differ markedly from that found in the other two sites. The real difference appears in the evidence from
62 Marianne Dumitrache and Monika Remann, “Besiedlungsgeschichte im Lübecker ‘Kaufleuteviertel’,” Lübecker Schriften zur Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte 17 (1988): 112.
MEDIEVAL LÜBECK’S GARDENS
595
the sixteenth century; this is the only site in Lübeck containing significant numbers of exotic spices such as pepper and coriander. This evidence suggests a high standard of living for the residents, as well as the possibility that the site was used by an importer of spices. The botanical evidence derived from the archaeological digs in Lübeck records a wide variety of plants. The useful plants preserved there range from fruits, both wild and cultivated, nuts, vegetables, herbs, spices, and those used for flavoring beer, for fibre, and for oil. Some of these plants, such as hops and raspberries, are found throughout the city, in ecclesiastical, merchant, and artisanal sites. Others are found only in a very few places during a very short time period, such as the peppercorns found only in the merchants’ area. In many cases, the evidence provided by plant remains is the only proof that exists that certain types of plants were grown or consumed within the city. This is one of the great boons offered to the historian by the archaeological evidence; it can throw open a window and show a much wider range than appears in the documentary evidence. The case of Lübeck also reveals how this archaeological evidence can confirm what is known from the documents. Several of the plants found in the archaeological record, such as apples, hops, and cabbages, also appear in the documents. This evidence suggests that produce grown outside the city was consumed within it, and that rural growers supplied the urban market. This was an important aspect of the urban-rural relationship. In most cases, archaeology makes the identification more specific, since medieval documents name plants according to the custom of the day, and not according to the Linnean system of genus and species used by the palaeobotanist. In one case, however, in Lübeck, it worked the other way. Allium pollen could be identified, but its species could not. Both onions and garlic were named in a document, thus adding to the picture provided by the pollen analysis.63 The evidence from Lübeck shows not only what people of different economic and social status were consuming, but also how well documentary and archaeological evidence combine to provide a more complete picture than either can individually.
63
LUB, 3: 771.
596
CHARLOTTE MASEMANN
The picture that emerges of the role of Lübeck’s gardens in the life of the city appears consistent with other research on the urban-rural relationship in the Hanse and beyond. Many of Lübeck’s wealthier citizens owned land around the city, and some indeed owned whole villages.64 Citizens of Lübeck were also highly involved in gardens outside the city. Ownership or renting of land outside the city was of course an economic link, but it also had important effects on territorial politics. Many cities, Lübeck included, encouraged this sort of economic relationship so as to tighten the city’s hold on the area around it.65 Franz Irsigler has argued convincingly that cultivators in the area around Cologne in the Middle Ages made choices based on demands from the urban markets. Irsigler notes that increasing cultivation of cash crops such as woad and hops formed part of the phenomenon of response to demand from urban markets around Cologne.66 He also indicates that the cultivation of gardens outside the city was strongly linked to the city itself: “Der breite Gürtel von Gartenland, der sich um die mittelaterlichen Städte des Rheinlandes ausbildete, wurde von der Stadt aus bewirtschaftet.”67 The crop that illustrates this point best in Lübeck is the hop. Hops appear in significant numbers in both documentary and archaeological evidence. As we have seen, a significant proportion of the gardens around the city grew hops, presumably because there was a market for them within the city. Hops grown around Lübeck were sold within the city, and were either used for brewing there or for export.68 Hops were unequivocally a cash crop; the possibility is slight that they were consumed only by their growers. 64 Fritze has made similar observations (Konrad Fritze, Bürger und Bauern zur Hansezeit. Studien zu den Stadt-Land-Beziehungen an der südwestlichen Ostseeküste vom 13. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1976), 85, 87). 65 Fritze, Bürger, 68. 66 Franz Irsigler, “Die Gestaltung der Kulturlandschaft am Niederrhein unter dem Einfluß städtischer Wirtschaft,” in Hermann Kellenbenz, ed., Wirtschaftsentwicklung und Umweltbeeinflussung (14.-20. Jahrhundert) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982), 181. 67 “The broad belt of gardens that formed around the medieval cities of the Rhine was cultivated from the city outwards”(author’s translation) (Irsigler, “Die Gestaltung,” 186). 68 Wilhelm Stieda, “Studien zur Gewerbegeschichte Lübecks. 3. Hopfenbau,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Lübeckische Geschichte und Altertumskunde 3 (1-2) (1887): 6-7
MEDIEVAL LÜBECK’S GARDENS
597
Historians of agriculture consider horticulture as a more intensive form of cultivation.69 Cultivators of gardens usually manured them more thoroughly and cultivated them by hand rather than with a plough. This was especially true of hop gardens, since the perennial plantings made ploughing impossible and hops are very heavy feeders. Seen in this light, the presence of many gardens just outside the walls of Lübeck can be interpreted as part of an island of intensification that spread out beyond the city, a model first suggested by F. K. Riemann. Riemann argued that in thickly populated areas and those dominated by large towns and cities, agriculture is carried on more intensively as a result of the influence of those urban agglomerations.70 This idea has influenced the work of many agrarian historians and continues to have relevance.71 It is unclear how far this island extended; the ratio of land used for intensive cultivation, or gardens, to the land used for field crops is also unknown. The gardens of Lübeck seem therefore to fit into a pattern seen in other medieval cities in which they were an important part of the city-country relationship. Many of their owners came from the city, they supplied produce for consumers within the city from a range of socio-economic levels, and they formed a ring of intensive cultivation around the city.
69 Joan Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 17. Irsigler notes that 1,000 gardeners could occupy themselves on land cultivated by 100 farmers (Irsigler, “Die Gestaltung,” 194). 70 F. K. Riemann, Ackerbau und Viehhaltung in vorindustriellen Deutschland (Kitzingen-Main: Holzner, 1953), 29. 71 B. H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500-1850, trans. Olive Ordish (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), 15-6; Edith Ennen, “Wechselwirkungen mittelalterlicher Agrarwirtschaft und Stadtwirtschaft, aufgezeigt am Beispiel Kölns,” in Cultus et Cognitio. Festschrift A. Gieysztor (Warsaw: Paxstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1976), 140-1; Adriaan Verhulst, “Bronnen en problemen betr. de Vlaamse landbouw in de late middeleeuwen,” Ceres en Clio, Zeven Variaties op het Thema Landbouwgeschiedenis (Wageningen: Veenman, 1964), 205-12.
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INDEX
Aachen, 441 Aalst, 325 Abbeville, 199-200 Abbo, rector of the Tarentais, 259 ‘Abd al-‘Azíéz Abué Faéris, Sultan of sid dynasty), 435-6 Tunis (Haf . . Abel, Wilhelm, 379 I, Abué ‘Abd Allaéh Muhammad . Sultan of Tlemcen, 435-6 b. Abíé Abué ‘Abd Allaéh Muhammad . Yahya é , 435 . Abú Sa‘íd ’Uthmán III, Sultan of Morocco (Marínid dynasty), 435 Abulafia, David, 416-7 accounts and accounting, 436, 475, 479-480, 486, 502, 554, 558, 560-1, 569; bookkeeping, 112, 477; books and ledgers, 139; 418, 466, 481; England, 154, 164, 176, 211, 213, 217, 21920, 329, 469-70; Flanders, 310, 314, 322, 330; Portugal, 105, 112-3, 212, 222, 225; Provence, 267 accountability, 212, 220, 225 Achilles, Walter, 379 administration, Catalonia, 120, 141; Egypt, 401, 403-4; England, 160, 183, 212, 215, 220, 243, 245; financial, 211, 232; organization and methods, 90, 113, 120; Portugal, 99-117, 223-6, 230-1; Provence, 258, 263 Adrar, 423 Adrar des Iforas, 394, 413 Afonso, Duarte, 110 Afonso V, King of Portugal, 96, 114, 220-2
Africa, access to, 93, 94, 97, 99100, 117, al-Bilaéd al-Suédaén, 389; commodities, 417; European trade with, 102, 105, 115, 117; gold, 98, 102, 115, 387-90, 393, 413; slaves, 99, 103-4, 107, 108 Africa, East, gold, 396; Africa, North, 101, 417; captaincies, 221; commerce, 418; copper, 419; specie markets, 396; Sicilian wheat, 298 Africa, sub-Saharan, 415 Africa, West, 94-6, 99, 100-1, 105, 106, 108, 110, 117; malagueta, 417 Agli, Bernabò degli (firm), 431-2 Agordo, 447 Agricola, 439 agriculture, 250, 302, 597; goods, 539; historians of, 597; improvements, 569; labor, 266; production, 353, 376; productivity, 297, 375; products, 305; technologies of, 350; Tuscan, 292; Agrigento, 299, 301, 307 Ahaggar, 394, 413 b. Abíé Sanuéna, 435 Ahmad . Aix (en Provence), 263, 267 Alberti, Alberto degli, 427 Alberti, Diamante and Altobianco degli (firm), 419 Alberti, L. A., 276 Alchian, A. A., 271 Alcudia, 421 Alexandria, 388, 390, 396, 399; coinage, 402-3, 404; specie market, 409
610
INDEX
Alfons IV, King of Aragon, 123 Alfonso V, King of Aragon, 301, 306 Algeria, 415 Allenbach, 441 Allmand, Christopher, 188 Allon, Magaluf ben, 431-2, 436 Almeida, Francisco de, 104 Alps, 265, 387 Alsleben, Almuth, 590 America, cities, 172 Amsterdam, 363, 380; grain prices, 360-1 ancien régime, 120 Andrea, Domenico d’, 464 Andrea, Giovanni d’, 41-3, 46, 5357 Anjou, wine, 498, 501, 519, 524, 531-2 Anjou, counts of, 258 Annaba (Bône), 434, 435, 436 annuity, 85; census, 64, 83; censal, 122, 126, 128, 133, 139; liftrent, 558-9; Portugal, 220; rente viagère, 558-9; rents, 319 Ano Bom Island, 110 Antwerp, 351, 380, 485, 552; copper, 455; grain prices, 35461; markets, 361, 478; Pinxtenmarkt, 478; textiles, 470 Aquinas, Thomas (Saint), 50, 51 Arabian Sea, 391 Arabs, 434-5 Aragon, 122, 136, 145, 306; Crown of, 302, 416 arbitrage, 70, 475 Area, Bernat de, 140 Arezzo, 280 Arguim, 95, 98, 100, 103-8 Aristotle, 41-2, 51, 56; Ethics, 41; Politics, 41 Arles, 261, 263
Arnhem, 360 Arnold, Wilhelm, 64 Arquet, Abraham, 431, 432, 436 Arras, 315, 322, 324, 329; Congress of, 198; Treaty of, 483 Arrow-Debreu model, 271 arsenal, 193-4, 199 artillery, 193, 195-201, 203-4, 238 Artois, 199, 313, 326-7, 330, 3324, 336-7, 339, 341, 343-4, 346, 347; cities, 320; merchants, 327; money of, 313 Arundell (family), 252 Asia, 101; specie distribution, 389 Asia Minor, 387, 396 Atlas Mountains, 415 Austria, 447, 448 autonomy (sociological category), 66-7, 80 Aups, 264 Auvergne, wine, 498, 519, 524 Avennes, 200 Baiano, 273 Bailey, Mark, 308 Bailleul, 325, 337, 339, 341, 3434, 346-7 Bakewell, 181 Balearic Islands, 411, 415-7, 424, 426-7, 434; copper trade, 416, 419, 424, 426, 429, 438, 441; merchants, 412, 419; protectionism, 418; records, 426; reexports, 416; staples, 416 Ballard, Adolphus, 168 Baltic Sea, 166, 573; grain, 373; wood, 550 Bambeke, 324 banking and bankers, 467, 485; Barcelona, 132, 134; Borromei, 466-8, 475-7, 480, 482, 484-8; Borromei Bank Research Project, 460, 465; centers, 475; companies, 460; houses, 328,
INDEX
467; Italian, 481; merchantbankers, 470-2, 475 Banská Belá, 451 Banská Bystrica (Neusohl, Besztercebánya), 392, 451-5 Banská Štiavnica, 451 Banué ’Amr b. Zoghba, 435 Baratier, Edouard, 263-4, 267 “Barberia” (Barbary, see Maghrib), 428 Barcelona, 120, 122-4, 127, 130, 132, 134, 262, 436, 475, 476; Borromei, 467, 472, 475-6, 480, 481-3, 485, 486-8; Datini branch, 418; Italians, 475; trade, 416 Barcelona, Count of, 262 Barchi, Cesare de, 108 Bardi (family), 467 Barrera, Pere, 431 Bartolo, Bastiano di, 428, 432 Basel, 465 Bassa, Pere, 431-2 Bavaria, 447 Bavinchove, 324 Beaufort, Henry, cardinal, 197 Beauvais, 500, 519, 524 Beaugency, 191 Beaumanoir, Philippe de, 541 Beccario, Battista, 424 Bedfordshire, 153 Belgium, 311 Bello, Duarte, 110-1 Bellviure, Francesc, 432 Benedictine Order, 583 Benevent, Peyre de, 261 Bengal, Bay of, 391 Benin (Kingdom of), 111 Benedetti, Ser Marco, 433 Bere Ferrers, 387 Bergues, 324-5, 337, 339, 341, 343-4, 346-7
611
Berkeley, 216 Berwick, 154, 158, 181 Biervliet, 199 bill of exchange, 436; 471-9, 482, 484 bi-metallic, equilibrium, 387, 3901; exchange, 389; parity, 389; ratio, 387, 389, 396, 398, 4007, 409-10; standard, 389, 391; uniformity, 391 Bindotti, Giovanni, 466 Birgu, 302 al-Bíéríé, 402 Biscaro, Girolamo, 486 488 Black Death, 53, 119, 124, 127, 135-6, 138, 153, 269, 281-2, 290, 375 Black, Henry, 146 Blanchard, Ian, 412-3, 415-6 Bleiberg, 445 Bloch, Marc, 257-8 Blockmans, Wilhelm, 126 Bodrugan (family), 252 Boescheppe, 322, 324 Bohemia, 387; miners and mining, 446, 449; ores, 442 Bologna, 47, 54, 464 Bon, Bernardo, 424, 426, 428 Bonaccorso, Nofri di, 426 bondage, 257-8, 265, 269; personal, 262; to land, 266-7, 269; to lord, 269; “to this land,” 257-258 Bonet, Jaume, 431 Bordeaux, 238, 246, 248-9 Borromei (family), 460, 463-4, 470-1, 475, 478, 484; agents, 468; Alessandro Borromei and Lazzaro di Giovanni & Co., 464; Antwerp, 485; banks, 460, 467-8, 475, 477, 485, 486-7; Barcelona, 472, 480-1; Barcelona bank, 467, 483, 485, 487,
612
INDEX
488; “Borromei Bank Research Project”, 460, 465; BorromeoArese family archive, 465; Bruges partnerships/companies, 464-6, 471, 472, 475-83, 485-8; Felipe da Fagnano & Co., 487; Filippo Borromei & Co., 466, 479, 485, 488; Florence partnerships, 464; Galeazzo di Borromeo Borromei & Co. of London, 464, 466; Geneva, 472; ledgers, 465, 467, 469-72, 484, 488; London, 471, 480, 485; London partnerships/ companies, 464-9, 471, 475, 477, 478-9, 481-3, 485-8; Milan partnerships, 465, 485, 488; profits and losses, 474, 481-4, 487; textiles, 468-9; Prevosto e Alessandro Borromei & Co., 487; Venice partnerships/companies, 464-5, 483, 485; Venice, 471-3, 480, 482; wool, 467, 468-9, 477 Borromei, Alessandro di Antonio, 462, 465, 485 Borromei, Alessandro di Filippo, 464-5 Borromei, Alessandro di Piero, 463, 465, 487 Borromei, Antonio, 485 Borromei, Antonio di Borromeo, 462, 464-5, 480-1, 483 Borromei, Antonio di Francesco, 464-5 Borromei, Antonio di Lodovico, 463-4 Borromei, Bartolomeo di Francesco, 461, 463 Borromei, Benedetto di Lodovico, 463-4 Borromei, Borromeo di Antonio, 462, 465 Borromei, Borromeo di Filippo, 461 Borromei, Carlo di Antonio, 462
Borromei, Filippo di Lazzaro, 460 Borromei, Filippo I di Vitaliano I, 462, 466, 488 Borromei, Francesco, 461 Borromei, Francesco di Bartolomeo, 463 Borromei, Gabriello di Lodovico, 464-5 Borromei, Galeazzo di Borromeo, 464-5 Borromei, Galeazzo di Giovanni II, 462 Borromei, Guiliano di Piero, 464-5 Borromei, Giovanni di Borromeo, 462, 464 Borromei, Giovanni di Filippo, 461, 462 Borromei, Giovanni Andrea (Prevosto) di Vitaliano I, 462, 486-7 Borromei, Lazzaro di Giovanni II, 463, 465, 480-1, 485 Borromei, Lodovico, 461 Borromei, Lodovico di Bartolomeo, 463 Borromei, Margherita di Filippo, 462 Borromei, Piero, 461 Borromei, Piero di Bartolomeo, 463-4 Borromei, Piero di Gabriello, 463 Borromei, Tomasso di Matteo (?), 464 Borromei, Venturino di Vitaliano, 462 Borromei, Vitaliano I, Count, 4612, 465-6, 485-8 Bosporus, 135 Boston, 246, 329 Boto, Dr Rui, 224 Bourbourg, 325, 337, 339, 341, 343-4, 346-7 Bourges, cathedral, 504
INDEX
Brabant, 206, 349, 351; alliance with England, 189-90; markets, 350; towns, 325; wool, 468 Brahminism, 76 brass (“yellow copper”), 99, 103, 420-1, 427, 439, 494, 509, 527 Braudel, Fernand, 571 Brecht, Bertold, 41 Bridbury, Anthony, 138, 233 Bridgenorth, 152, 182 Brien, Lord Guy de, Admiral of the West, 251 Brignoles, 261, 263 Bristol, 154, 159, 169, 180-1, 183, 246; port of, 218; revenues, 218; Britain, 254 Britnell, Richard, 375 Brittany, 239, 253 Brixlegg, 449, 457 bronze, 194, 199-200, 439, 495, 510-1 Broussole, Jean, 123 Brucker, Gene, 144 Bruges, 188, 200, 310, 313, 320, 325-6, 329, 331, 334, 337, 339, 343, 344, 347, 371, 380, 427, 466, 472; banking, 467; Borromei, 464-8, 471-2, 474-83, 4858; castellany, 331, 336; Catalans, 476; constitution of, 324; copper, 419, 441, 447; credit, 419; exchange rates, 473-4; fairs, 330, 332-3; Franc of, 316, 321, 325, 331; grain prices, 356, 359-61; Hanse, 441; imports, 470; Italians, 476; merchants, 327, 332, 334, 484; money market, 470; rebellion, 208, 483; trade, 331, 334; troops, 203, 204, 206 Brussels, 351, 380; grain prices, 356, 359-61 Buckingham, estates, 218
613
Buckingham, Duke of, 216 Buda (Tuat oasis, Sahara), 421, 423-5 Buda (Hungary), 450 bullion (see also precious metals), 383, 470-2, 482-4; “Great Bullion Famine,” 383; ordinances, 483 bullionism, 176 Burford, 468 Burgundy, 188, 197, 259; alliance with England, 191-2, 196-8, 483; alliance with France, 191, 198, 209, 483; army, 193, 194, 202-4, 209; artillery, 187, 193201; fleet, 203-4; hostilities with England, 208, 483; Hundred Years War, 190; Joan of Arc, 191; leaders, 194-5; sieges, 191, 196-8, 205 Burgundy, Dukes of, 375 Burgos, 327 Burwash, Dorothy, 248 Byzantium (Empire), 43 Cabral, Diogo Fernandes, 110 Cadzand Island, 208 Cairo, coinage, 402; gold-silver ratio, 398 Calais, 191, 197-8, 203, 208, 315; siege of, 198-206, 208-9, 239, 483; Staple of, 468, 477, 482 Calatayud, 137 calculability, rational, 74 Calderini, Giovanni, 55 Cambay, 391 Cambrai, 326, 337, 339, 341, 3434, 346-7 Campanaro, Battista, 434 Canary Islands, 98 Canche River, 330 Cannes, 263 Cantor, 108
614
INDEX
Cape Verde Islands, 96-9, 106, 110 Cape Bojador, 93, 97 Capetian dynasty, 261, 263 capital, 155, 268, 279, 292, 564, 571; administrative, 245; assets, 571; Borromei, 466-7, 485, 487-8; commitment, 283; concentration, 334; concentration of in central place, 311; fixed, 278; intensive, 311; investment, 121, 235, 275-7; land, 565; losses, 280; maintenance, 281; market, 275, 320, 326, 331, 334, 336 political, 114; social, 114; value, 277; working, 279, 283 capitals, 120-1, 356, 363, 370 capitalism, 60, 68, 71, 73-7, 79, 83-5, 90 111, 544, 571; “capitalismo monárquico português” (Portuguese state capitalism), 90, 111 capitalist, 62-3, 65, 68, 71, 570-1; capitalistic development, 571; economy, 117 Capitana (galley), 427 caravan, trade, 387, 394, 411; trails (Sahara), 394, 396, 413, 414, 421, 423-4; robbery, 434-6 Cardiff, 150, 179 Carinthia, 447 Carneiro, António, 110-1, Carocci, Cristofano di Bartolo, 427-31 Carpathian Mountains (western), 451 Carpatho-Balkan area (metallogenic), 451 Cassel, 325, 337, 339, 341, 343-4, 346, 347 Castagnolo, Paolo di Antonio da, 466, 486, 488 Castellane, 264-5
Castile, 124, 128, 136, 253; merchants, 333; wars with Portugal, 220, 428; Catalan dynasty, 262-3 Catalonia, count-kings of, 261 Catalonia, 119, 122-38, 141-2; cartography, 424; censal, 126, 128, 130-5, 139, 141-2; Corts, 12932, 139; fogatge, 131, 138-9; imposicions, 122-24, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134-5, 138-9; imports, 416; maritime trade, 415; merchants, 305, 424; tallia, 123, 130-2, 134, 139; violari, 130-3, 135 Catania, 299-300 Cattano, Cristofano, 468 Celle, 444 CŠechoslav, Jan, 446 centinaio (unit of weight), 428 central place, 310-2, 319, 322, 326-8, 334, 363, 368, 373; function, 310, 326; theory, 311, 321; Ypres, 312, 316, 319, 322, 334 cessant gain (lucrum cessans) (interest title), 57, 83 Ceuta, defence of, 221 Champagne, fairs, 310, 313-4, 328-33 Champion, Pierre, 196 Charles VII, King of France (previously the Dauphin), 192-3, 203, 209 Charles, Duke of Bourbon, 205 charters, 85; royal or government, 96, 99, 146, 149, 151, 165, 168-71, 179, 183, 224, 231, 235, 244, 322, 545; exemptions, 166, 168-9; foreign nation, 333 China, gold, 391; merchants, 391 Chartier, Jean, 201 Chartres, cathedral, 504-6
INDEX
Chemnitz, 445 Chepstow, 154 Chester, 181, 246; Earl of, 536-7 Chioggia, 144-5 Chittagong, 391 Christaller, Walter, 311, 363-5 Chopa (vessel), 430 Christianity, 60, 72, 77-80, 82; medieval, 44, 60, 79 Christians, Papal authority, 93, 97; Majorca, 431; merchants, 412; “Old Christians”, 425-6, 433; relations with non-Christians, 92, 94 Church, Catholic 49, 59, 68-9, 72-3, 74, 77-9, 81, 94, 260, 465, 555; early, 43; eastern, 43 CŠiereazš Mountains, 452 Ciompi Revolt, 143 Cinque Ports, 235 Ciompi Revolt, 143 Circassian [Mamlu k] (dynasty, Egypt), 387 Cistercian Order, 583 cities, 369, 378, 506, 538, 542, 582, 596-7; American, 172; Artois, 320; Catalan, 120, 1224, 129, 133-6, 141; civitas, 121; classes in, 119; debt, 119; demesnal, 308; elites, 569; European, 119, 349-50, 363; Flemish, 126, 310, 324, 326, 334, 552; food, 350, 362-3; German, 64; Italian, 68, 298; Maltese, 308; Mediterranean, 142, medieval, 597; mediumsized, 144; Picardy, 320; Portuguese, 227, royal, 129; Sicilian, 299-301, 304 Clarence, Duke of, 216 Clausthal-Zellerfeld, 444 cloth, 102, 103, 147, 162, 165, 223, 469-70, 481, 494, 496-502, 509, 513-5, 524, 547, 566;
615
broadcloth, 469; demand for, 432; European, 418; English, 483, 499, 524; export of, 250, 329, 418, 469, 477; Flemish, 476; industry, 207; luxury, 477; market, 147; production of, 315, 322, 470; sales of, 329, 468-9; supply of, 305; types of, 322; Ypres, 310, 322, 329 clothing, 98, 496, 499-500, 515, 524, 539, 546, 561, 566, 569 Cockermouth, 173 coins, 48, 50-2, 313, 379, 396, 400-4, 408, 471, 496, 512-3, 539, 566; circulation, 402-3; debasement of, 401-2; English, 314; exchange, 379, 402; export of, 403; foreign, 313; gold, 402, 430; silver, 313, 401, 484; supply of, 213, 383; transfer of, 470 coinage, 401, 483; administration of, 403; copper, 403; Flemish, 313; gold, 401; re-coinage, 484; silver, 401; value of, 484 Cokerulle, rebellion, 321-2 Colchester, 154, 246 Cologne, 441, 596 Collo, 435, 436 Comino, 301 commerce, 62, 85, 207, 349, 434, 571; medieval, 147, 174, 178, 491; England, 176, 349; fifteenth-century, 349; Flanders, 207; Ghent, 559, 565, 569-70; late medieval, 373; Levant, 399, 402; Low Countries, 349; Lübeck, 579; North Africa, 415, 418; North Sea, 350; regulation, 374; Sicily, 306; transSaharan, 434; viability, 176; urban, 491, 493- 501, 503-30; Western Mediterranean, 415 commercial, activity/presence, 151, 160, 163, 166, 172, 297, 308, 389, 593; associations, 64;
616
INDEX
blockade, 207; capitalism, 90; cargo, 237; “catchment areas,” 447; centers, 169, 538; cities, 477; correspondence, 481; credit, 310, 333; customs, 65; dealings, 538; development, 176; disputes, 483; economy, 166, 176, 325; estate, 438; expeditions, 93; exploitation, 298; freightage, 237, 249; goods, 545; hazards, 503; industry, 545; infractions, 315; interests, 245; inventories, 503; law, 59, 66; life, 79; networks, 389, 394; “non-commercial”/“uncommercial,” 569, 571; operations, 113; partnerships, 60-1, 65, 85; practices, 69, 177, 506; privileges, 172, 308; protectionism, 320; reasoning, 484; regulation, 146; relations, 171, 306, 312; sites/venues, 173-4, 228; societies, 542; system, 391; transactions, 402; ventures, 412, 565; voyages, 63; commercialization, 297-8, 308, 564 commodities, 96-100, 105, 109, 122, 127, 146-7, 150, 153, 1567, 160-3, 165-6, 174, 181, 284, 298-9, 308, 383, 404-407, 412, 432, 467, 472, 494, 547, 566, 568 commodization, 570 Compiègne, 193; artillery, 195-6; governor of, 194; defence of, 194, 196; siege of, 191-2, 1945, 197-8, 209 Confucianism, 76-7, 79 Constitutum usus (Pisan commercial code), 65-6 consumers, 364, 567; food, 349; grain, 352; produce, 597; urban, 373; wheat, 352-3 consumptibility, 50, 56 consumption, 49-50, 572, 578-81, 586, 589, 595; centres, 364-5, 368; essential goods, 376; fire-
wood, 369; food, 582, 592; fruit, 591-2; grain, 299-301, 303, 368; hops, 596; household, 593-4; increase in, 353; levels, 353; loans, 63; needs, 85; norm, 369; plants, 582, 586, 595; point of, 364; price inelastic, 353; produce, 572, 595; species, 581; taxes, 119, 122, 126-7, 132, 134, 142-3; vegetables, 594; wood, 370 contado, 143, 299 Contamine, Philippe, 190 Contarini (family), Alvise, 427; Antonio, 427; copper, 424, 427-8 430 Contestí, Antoni, 426 contract, 9, 45, 48, 49, 53, 55-6, 69-70, 96-7, 99, 106-12, 115, 263, 266, 277, 280-1, 283, 287, 290, 314, 466, 486-7, 554; census, 64; Edgeworthian contract curves, 291; emphyteusis, 262, 266; lease, 48; marriage, 562-4, 571; medium vestum, 260; monopoly, 111; rental, 48; sharecropping (see mezzadria); stipulatio, 49 converso (Jewish convert to Christianity), 424, 432-4 Cope, William, 218, 220 copper, 392, 399, 401, 403, 411457; Belluno, 447; Enns Valley, 448; Erzgebirge, 445-7; Hammergarkupfer, 420; Hungarian, 438; Hunsrück, 441; Harz, 4425; ingot (hallmarked), 420, (loaf) 419-20, 428, 432; Low Countries (Bruges), 419; plate, 419, 421, 428-9, 431, 437-8, 448; Polish, 438, 441, 447; raw (Schwarzkupfer), 420; rod, 419, 437; Rosettenkupfer, 420; scrap, 419; Salzach, 447; Schwaz/ Brixlegg (Inn Valley), 448-50; Slovak, 438, 441, 450-6; Swe-
INDEX
dish, 441, 447; Valle del Fersina, 447; Walchen, 448 Corbie, 326 Corbinelli, Antonio, 464 Cornwall, Duchy of, 215-6, 218, 245 Cornwall, 235, 246, 250; shipping, 251; textiles, 500, 519, 524; tin, 420 costs, commodity, 103, 353, 369, 468, 507; borrowing/credit, 475; cost-benefit analysis, 113; farm, 279-80, 548; fortifications, 113; gunpowder weapons, 187, 1978; information, 287; labour, 442; monitoring, 275-6, 291; opportunity, 57, 291; ports and ships, 235-9, 243, 248, 250-1, 253; production, 363-5, 376; prospecting, 449; revenue generation, 112, 220; royal household, 214-5, 217; state and government, 91, 210, 215, 221; taxation, 140, 152; trade, 178, 308; transaction costs, 100, 112-3, 271, 297, 351, 362, 503; transport and travel, 290, 352, 362-4, 373-5, 377-9, 468, 470; war, 93, 187, 190, 233-5 Côte d’Or, 199 Courtenay (family), 252 Courtrai, 188 Coventry, 168 credit/creditor, 48, 50-1, 53-4, 67, 81, 85, 135, 143-4, 214, 268, 312-6, 319, 321-2, 326, 332-4, 466, 467, 475, 479-81, 498, 501-3, 507, 530-7; Catalonia, 132, 135; Champagne Fairs, 328; city, 141; commercial, 310-348, 431, 433, 437, 458, 468, 471-2, 475, 484; creditore, 458; credit market, 133; Flanders, 315; Florence, 144; Genoa, 143; Ghent, 533, 558;
617
Portugal, 221; Provence, 268269; Ypres, 310-348 Creil, 197 crisis, absence of, 269; climatic, 267; demographic, 275, 281, 287, 293; “energy,” 442; fourteenth-century, 119, 275, 293; gold, 383, 393, 399, 401, 407; in Manresa, 136, 142-3; Malthusian, 267; PugetTheniers, 269; revenues, 91; socio-political, 91, 425 Croatia, 450 Crokele (Crokesle), Richard, 517 Croft, Sir Richard, 212 Crouch, David, 508 Crown, Aragonese, 121, 123-4, 127, 129, 132-5, 140, 301-2, 416, 428; Castilian, 135; English, 176-8, 214-6, 218, 220-1, 231, 233, 235, 237, 240-1, 243, 245, 248-50, 470; Portuguese, 89-118, 221, 222-8, 231-2 cruzado (unit of currency), 111 Cumbria, 235 Cunningham, Sean, 210 Cuper, Nicholas, 587 currency, 187, 387; common, 484; Egyptian, 401; foreign, 480; fractional, 402; fluctuations of, 187; manipulation of, 483; prevailing, 352; values of, 352; Venetian, 401 customs, legal, 65, 69, 146, 170, 173-4, 177-83, 324, 502, 542, 545, 551, 555, 559, 561-5, 570; customals, 541; customary law, 539, 541, 543-9, 553, 555, 564 customs, 91-2, 96, 112, 130, 167, 176, 216-20, 228, 230-1, 243, 437, 468, 484; accounts, 329, 469-70; African regions, 105; agencies and officials, 101, 244, 307; customary charges/dues, 148, 152, 167, 216, 223, 252;
618
INDEX
farming-out, 109; valuations, 469 Dalton, 173 Daémghaén, 391 Dandolo (firm), 430 Danzig (Gdaxsk), 441 Dar’a, 423 Dartmouth, 244-6, 249, 250-1; harbour, 245, 251; revenues, 180, 218 Datini, Francesco di Marco of Prato, 411-2, 417, 428, 431-4, 436-7 Datini (firm), 424-7, 432, 441, 449, 454; agents and factors, 411, 417, 424, 427, 431; archive, 411, 416-9, 441, 458; Barcelona branch, 418 431, 437; Compagnia di Catalogna, 417-8, 427; competitors, 428; copper, 426-9, 431, 432-4, 4368, 455-6; Florence mother company, 431, 436; Jews, 4301; ledgers, 421, 456; letters, 418, 421, 424, 426, 438, 456; Majorca branch, 412, 418-9, 420, 427, 432, 436, 437, 458; North Africa, 418; Tuat caravan, 434; Valencia branch, 418, 429, 431-3, 436 Darwin, 273 Dauphiné, 265 Day, John, 383 debt, 135, 137, 142-4, 207, 268, 313, 481, 502-3, 531-4, 553-8, 561; civic, 119, 131-3, 139, 141; collection of, 312, 554; debtors, 46, 49-60, 53, 68, 3123, 315-6, 322, 333, 432, 471, 475, 480, 556; funded, 143; policy, 144; public, 132, 134, 464; recognitions, 310, 312-3, 315, 319, 321-2, 328-9, 331, 335; royal household, 211, 214, 219, 221-2, 227; secured, 555-
6; system, 119, 134, 144; unsecured, 554; Ypres and its jurisdiction, 312-5, 322, 324-9, 331-2, 334 deforestation, 442 Della Casa, Antonio, & Co., 486 demography and demographic trends, 91, 142, 144, 274-5, 280-3, 287, 290, 293, 303, 349, 375, 503 Del Treppo, Mario, 305 De Vries, Kelly, 187 Des Marez, Guillaume, 310-1 Dendermonde, 325 Derby, 177, 181 Despy, Georges, 147 Devon, 153, 235, 244, 246, 248, 250-1, 387 Devon, Earl of, 252 Dhué ’Ubayd Allaéh (nomads), 435 Dias, Manuel Nunes, 90 Dickinson, Joyceline Gledhill, 198 dinar (unit of currency), 401, 404, 408; double (dobla), 389, 399400, 402, 408, 413, 437; naésirí . é 404, 409-10 dirham (unit of currency), fulués, 401-4, 408; half-Mu’ayyadíé, 40910 dividend, fixed (certum lucrum), 63 double (dobla) (unit of currency), 389, 413, 437 (see also dinar) Domesday Book, 149, 153, 179 Domesday Books, 154; Ipswich, 146-8, 163 domination (sociological category), 78, 260, 262 dominium, 93 Dordrecht, 441 Dorset, 246; revenues, 218 Douai, 310, 329, 337, 339, 341, 343-4, 346-7, 351, 380, 570;
INDEX
castellany, 320; constitution, 324; fairs, 330 Dover, 153 Drava River, 450 Drienok, 453 Drogheda, 182-3 Dublin, 182 Duby, George, 259, 266 ducat (unit of currency), 402, 404, 409-10, 473, 475 ducat (aka dinar ifrantíé) (unit of currency), 402, 404 Dufourq, Charles-Emmanuel, 416 Dulcert, Angelino, 424 Dumitrache, Marianne, 594 Dunkirk, 208 Durance River, 264 Durham, 246, 369 Dyer, Christopher, 368 economic, actions, 77, 79; activity, 363, 376; advantages, 250, 374; approach, 114; barrier, 373; change, 66, 150, 223, 257; concepts, 365; condition, 81; contraction, 152; control, 325; costs, 190, 233; crossconnections, 453; culture, 565; depression, 426; development, 59-63, 67, 72-3, 79, 81, 84, 239, 543; divide, 191; dislocation, 268; doctrines, 64; enterprises, 91; environment, 177; equivalent, 272; ethics, 57, 73, 75-6, 80; expansion, 61; events, 274; evolution, 272; firms, 81; goals, 112; growth, 78, 151, 349; health/well-being, 174, 208; historians, 54, 85, 147, 235, 377, 503; history, 233, 71; illogic, 267; integration, 298; institutions, 60; interests, 84, 173; intervention, 308; impact, 268, 375; issues/matters/affairs, 60, 71, 79, 96, 173, 187; life, 542, 544, 554; limits, 377; link,
619
596; meaning, 564; needs, 62; niches, 503; opportunities, 91; players, 92; potential, 321; practices, 72, 82-3, 571; pressures, 269; privileges, 308; process, 77, 272; problems/ difficulties/troubles, 45, 191, 208, 257, 267, 432; procedures, 70; process, 89; projects, 91; questions, 44; rationale, 172; rationality, 92, 565; rationalization, 77-8; recovery, 218; reforms, 301; regulations, 68, regions, 311-2; relationships, 596; relevance, 64; resources, 266, 299; results, 82, 351; rewards, 565; scene, 62; sectors, 418; sphere, 80; status, 259, 595; structures, 71, 82; terms, 100; theories, 365; thought, 43, 47, 50, 54, 114; transactions, 78; viability, 364, 452-3; viewpoint, 61 economics, 191, 271; of household, 91; “New Institutional Economics” (NIE), 270 economists, 57, 59, 81-2 economy, economies, 73, 77, 178, 550; agrarian, 539; and agriculture, 302; capitalist, 60, 89, 117; commercial, 166, 176, 325, 350; commercialized, 298; Economy and Society, 61, 73, 75, 77; Egyptian, 405; English, 233; and ethics, 41; European, 67, 543; [financial restraint], 211, 215; Italian, 67; late medieval, 297; and law, 61, 667; Low Countries, 467; Manresan, 139; maritime, 235, 245; market, 80, 538, 564; medieval, 71, 539, 542; medieval Europe, 297; “middle band,” 416; modern, 77; monetized, 266; network, 270; overseas expansion, 89; political, 71, 82; port town, 146, 236, 239; profit, 80; rationalized, 77-8, 82; regional,
620
INDEX
415; and religion, 60-1, 75, 78, 86; salvation, 60, 79-80; shipping-based, 245, 350; Sicily, 300; site-based, 320; urban, 67, 150, 542-3; and war, 233, 235 Edward I, King of England, 150, 176-7 Edward II, King of England, 176 Edward III, King of England, 189, 253 Edward IV, King of England, 214, 216 Egypt, 383, 387, 389, 413; copper, 400-1, 415, 456; economy, 405; gold prices, 396-7, 399; goldsilver ratio, 406-7; monetary system, 399, 400-1, 415; specie markets, 396, 400-1, 404, 413, 415; Eiblschrofen, 449 Ekelund, Robert, 81 Elba, 464 Elburz (Reshteh-ye Alborz), 391 Elton, Sir Geoffrey, 211 Elverdinge, 321 emergent loss (damnum emergens) (interest title), 83 Endemann, Wilhelm, 64, 65, 67 England, 138, 146, 250, 320, 327, 336-7, 340, 342-4, 346, 348-9, 363, 368-9, 509, 570; AngloSaxon, 149; authors, 491, 493; balance of trade, 467, 469, 470; bills of exchange, 477; Borromei, 479, 485; conflicts with France, 234; conquest of, 188; Calais, 204, 205; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 212; Cofferer, 213, 217; 219-20, 231; Crown, 176-8, 221, 231, 233, 235-6, 245, 248-9, 250, 469; eastern, 468; fairs, 329; exchequer, 2112, 215-21, 231; Flanders, 206, 328, 329; firewood, 369-71; fleets, 203, 208, 240; grain prices, 354, 355, 356, 358-61;
Hundred Years War, 188-90, 233-6, 238, 245, 249, 253; imports, 477; king of, 205, 236; legislative control, 375; markets, 352; market integration, 349; merchants, 169, 172, 328; Papal revenues, 470; Parliament, 173, 189, 214-7, 231, 240-2; ports, 146, 233, 234, 235-6, 238, 240, 243, 246, 248; revenues, 146-78, 231; royal court, 210; royal household, 211-220, 232; shipping, 235, 237-41, 243, 248, 253-4; shopping, 483; silver, 387; southeastern, 349, 350, 369, 372, 376; southern, 354, 355-6, 35861, 380; textiles, 483, 499; towns, 169, 175, 233-6, 238, 248, 370, 372, 374-5; tolls, 146-78; trade, 156, 166, 238, 327, 329, 331; transfer of coin, 470; Treasury of the Chamber, 211-20, 231; Treasury of the Household, 212-5, 217, 220, 231; urban occupations, 504; warfare, 239, 253; wool, 163, 175, 328-9, 467-8, 477-8 English Channel, 251 Enns Valley, 448 Enrique I, King of Castile, 136, enterprise, Africa, 90, 92, 97, 1001, 106, 113-5, 117; Borromei, 481, 485-6; business/economic, 65, 69, 91; long distance, 111; noble, 91; overseas, 91, 92, 105, 111, 117; private, 91; royal/state, 91, 102, 117; shipbuilding, 240; urban zones, 172 epidemics, 91 Epstein, Steven, 142, 299, equilibrium (economic), 270-1 Erdmannsdorf, 446 Erg Chech, 421 Erzgebirge, 442, 445-6; copper, 447
INDEX
Erzgebirgsvorland, 442, 445-6 Essex, 246 Europe, 281, 413; aristocratic, 542; balance of trade, 467; banking, 475, 485; bullion, 383, 385; capitalism, 571; Central, 399; commodities/ goods, 418; early modern, 543; economy, 543; gold, 383-7, 391, 393-4, 396, 399, 401-2, 407; gold-silver ratio, 389, 391; copper, 438-9, 440, 443, 453, 455; medieval, 43, 57, 119, 137, 297; markets, 391; merchants, 404; minerals, 440; money payments, 471; Northern, 349-51, 363, 374-5, 385, 453, 464, 538-9, 543-4, 552; NorthWestern, 351, 361, 442; Roman law, 528; silver, 387, 389, 393, 413, 415; specie markets, 391, 399, 407; trade, 349, 389, 404-5, 413; wood, 550 evolution, 271, 277-80, 283, 286, 290-2, 356; Darwinian, 272; Lamarckian, 272; mechanisms (as analogies), 272; of contract, 274; of mezzadria, 280; of peasantry, 261-3; of tax systems, 120, 123 Evora, Pero de, 109 Évora, 211, 227 exceptio usurariae pravitatis (canonical defence), 69-70 Exeter, revenues, 179, 218, 238 exchange, 70, 83, 85, 560; bill of exchange, 436, 471-2, 476-9, 484; mercantile, 167, 300, 306, 320, 334, 351-3, 361-2, 416, 538 expenditures, 109, 126; royal household, 213, 215, 217, 219, 221-2; state, 91 Fagnano (family), Ambrogina da, 462; Giacomo da, 462; Felice da, 462, 486-7
621
fairs, 331, 338-40, 498, 524; Antwerp, 478; Bruges, 330, 333; Champagne, 310, 313-4, 328-33, 339-48; Christmas, 473; debts, 331; English, 148, 154, 171, 183, 329; Geneva, 472, 474; Ghent, 333; Flemish, 3304, 339-48; interregional, 310, 328, 331; Lille, 330; local, 331; Manresa, 121; Mesen, 330; payments, 331-3; Portugal, 223; Provins, 310; regional, 351; Sicily, 300; St Bartholomew, 474; St Peter, 474; tolls, 154; Torhout, 330; Ypres, 330, 3324, 339-48 Falkenstein, 448 Falchi, Giaconello de’, 426 Falun, 441 family/families, 121, 211-2, 252, 259, 263, 304, 324, 368, 370, 425, 447, 460-1, 464-5, 467, 485, 544, 550, 558, 564, 56870, 588-59, 593 famine, 91, 131, 137, 141, 483-4 Sultan of Egypt, Faraj (al-Na sir), . 401, 404 Farbisšte, 453 Farmer, David, 161-2 Fazuati, Samuel, 431 Felipe (Mestre), 108 Fenughil (Fenourhil), 423 Feraig, Balaix, 430 Ferdinand I, King of Aragon, 306 Feria bridge, 182 Fernandes, António, 109 Fernando, Infante Dom, 96, 114 Ferrer, Rafael, 431, 432 Fersina, 457 feudal, dominance, 121; dues, 123, 132, 134; economy, 60, 71; law, 92; lords, 300-1; period, 259; possessions, 120; tenure, 224, 268; towns, 121
622
INDEX
Février, Paul-Albert, 259 Fez, 415, 421, 434, 435 fief, 92, 120, 125, 302, 461, 549, 552 Figuig, 424 finance/financial/financing, 68, 85; administration, 211, 224-6, 2312, 401; assistance, 503; bureaucracy, 218; burden, 303; civic, 135; conquest, 129, 188; constraint, 213; court, 212; Crown, 221, 232, 327; effects, 135; deficit financing, 119; departments, 212, 220, 231; difficulties, 487; financiers, 130; forms of, 189; Ghent, 546, 573; household, 214-5, 219-20, 2223, 226-8, 231; incapacity, 141; institutions, 120; instrument, 471, 557-8; levies, 134; machinery, 119, 129-30, 212, 222; military, 188; ministers, 216; municipal, 129; operations, 312, 467; paper, 543; and Parliament, 189; planners, 145; public works, 148; recovery, 214, 227; reform, 122; rebellions, 188; records, 491; reform, 210; responsibility, 114; royal, 129, 211, 220-1, 230; stature, 425; trade, 477, 485; trouble, 215; urban, 124, 148, 150; walls, 151, 173, 181; war, 187-91, 196, 198, 206-8 Finland, firewood, 369 fisc/fiscal, 135-6, districts, 114; concerns, 301; “domain state,” 117; exhaustion, 129; fiscalism, 95-6; fiscality, 129; innovations, 121; institutions, 188; policy, 122; privileges, 308; problem, 91; system, 117, 128-9 Fischbach an der Nahe, 441 Fitzwarren, estates, 218 Flanders, 126, 199, 204, 312, 320, 324-7, 330-3, 336-7, 340-1, 343-6, 349, 351, 416; alliance
with England, 189, 207-8; balance of trade, 467; banking and capital market, 336, 475-6; cities, 310, 538; coinage and money, 313-4; copper, 319, 438, 441-2, 445, 447; fairs, 313, 330-3, 438; hostilities by England, 208, 328; merchants, 321, 329, 333; raids on, 253; rebellions, 188, 483; subjects of Burgundy, 206, 208; textiles, 476; towns, 315, 325; transfer of coin, 470; troops, 204, 205; Venetian galleys, 416, 427-8, 431; west, 552; wool, 329, 329, 468 Flanders, counts of, 315, 321, 545 Flavy, Louis de, 195 Flavy, Guillaume de, 194-6 Flextorfer-Zenner, 392 Florence, 53, 69, 107, 120, 134, 142-4, 280, 286-7, 290, 298, 428, 460; Borromei, 460-1, 464-5; Catasto of 1427, 464; Datini firm, 431; merchants and merchant houses, 321, 328, 392, 464-5, 469 florin (unit of currency), 52, 308, 401, 407-8, 410, 432, 434, 4645, 488 Fogo Island, 110 Fomseca, Joham de, 110 Fonseca, Afonso de, 104 Fontcuberta, Julià, 425 food and foodstuffs, 103, 174, 213-4, 222, 227, 320, 539, 550, 572, 581; access to, 375; consumption, 349, 582, 592; controls, 304, 374; crops, 580; demand for, 297, 372; duties and taxes, 306; exotic, 593; and gardens, 572-607; grains, 3504, 361-2, 368-9, 371; imported, 592; marketing, 374, 578; production, 349, 352, 368-9, 371; range of, 592-3; shortages, 267-
INDEX
8; sources of, 363, 372-3,375-6, 421, 572, 580; supply, 301, 363, 368-9, 372-3 373-4, 566; trades, 174, 495-6, 500, 503-7, 512, 527 Ford, C. J., 250 Fordwich, 158, 180 foreign, carriers, 248; coins, 313; correspondents, 471; creditors, 312; currency, 480, 484; debtors, 313; exchange, 485; income, 219, 230; merchants, 166-7, 300; nation, 333; operations, 465; policy, 129; shipping, 251; shippers, 232; trade, 228; traders, 167 foreigners, and trade, 166; taxes on, 131, 167, 170; Forqualquier, 262, 264 fortifications, 137, 141, 194, 201, 202-3, 514; cost of, 113, 238 402 Fostat (Fust. a t), . Fowey Water, 245, 246 Fowey, 250, 252 Freiberg, 445 Freiberg-in-Meissen, 387 France, 136-7, 147, 261, 327, 332, 336-7, 340-1, 343-4, 346-7, 509; coinage, 313; early modern, 570; English armies, 208; firewood, 369; Hundred Years War, 188, 190, 192; northern, 314; peace with Burgundy, 192; southern, 268, 333; Sicilian wheat, 298; wine, 519 Francia, 259 Francisco, Pedro, 110 Franks, 400 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, 298 Freiberg, 446 Frome, 153 Fryde, E. B., 469 fungible, 42, 49-53, 55-6, 564
623
Funk, Franz Xaver, 64 Furness, Abbey, 173 Fugger-Thurzo, partnership, 454-5 Galápagos Islands, 273 Gaddi, Zanobi di Tadeo, 427, 438 galley(s), Majorcan, 432-3; Venetian, 406, 416, 427-8, 429; Capitana, 427; Lombarda, 427; Moceniga, 427; Giustiniana, 427; Verzona, 428 Gallici, 392 Galloway, James, 368-70 Gambia River, 108-9 game (theory), 275-6; positive-sum, 275, 292; zero-sum, 292 Ganshof, FL, 149 Garéolt, 261 Garland, John, 491, 493, 495, 497-8, 504, 508-9, 514-7; Dictionarius, 492-4, 504-6, 508 Gascony, 238-9, 245; wine, 498, 501, 519, 524, 531-2 Gaussols, 265 Gdaxsk (Danzig), grain trade, 354 Gelnica (Hnilec, Gölniczbánya, Bánya, Bana), 453-5 Geneva, 470, 475; fairs, 472, 474 Gennaio, Tuccio di, 429 Genoa, 120, 129-31, 134-5, 142-4, 252, 298, 300, 407; gold, 401; gold-silver ratio, 398, 400; maritime trade, 415; merchants, 392, 412, 434 Géraud, Hercule, 508 Germany, 64, 70, 147, 188, 327, 333, 336, 338, 340, 342-4, 346, 348-9, 570; alliance with England, 189; creditors, 314; firewood, 369; laws, 552; merchants and merchant houses, 314, 328, 333-4, 392; scholars, 363; smelting, 420; towns, 361; trade, 349
624
INDEX
Ghadames, 387, 396 (Alcudia), 411, 420-1, Ghas. sa . é s. sa . 425, 429, 456 Ghent, 310, 324-6, 334, 371, 538, 545, 546, 547, 551, 559, 570, 571; aldermen (scepenen), 545, 546, 548, 552, 554; constitution, 324; custom, 545, 549, 553, 555, 559, 561-3, 565, 570; fairs, 330, 333; Gentenaren, 538, 544, 551, 553-4, 558-60, 563, 565-6, 569-71; houses, 551-2; jurisdiction, 552, 562; land, 539, 542-3, 546-8, 550-3, 555-6, 558, 561-2, 565-6, 56970; neighbours, 551; private property law, 545, 564; records, 547, 564; rents, 557-8, 562, 566; troops, 203-6 Ghir-Saoura, 423 Ghormali, 425 ibn Ghuraéb, Ibrahíém, 401-4 Giustiniana (galley), 427 Glandèves (family), 263 Gläser, Manfred, 583 Gloucester, Duke of, 215 Gloucester, Earl of, 530-2 Gloucester, 154-5, 159, 182-3 Gloucestershire, 153, 246 Godeveertsvelde, 322 Godinho, Vitorino Magalhães, 225 gold, 387, 389, 391, 393-4, 396, 399, 401-8, 413, 415, 430, 496, 498, 502, 507, 513, 516, 524, 527, 529, 533, 584; boom, 393, 396, 399, 407; Chinese, 391; coinage, 139, 389, 401, 484; crisis, 383, 407; European, 391, 393, 399, 402; markets, 383; mining, 387, 391; minting, 387; prices, 383-7, 389-90, 393-7, 399-400, 407; production, 391, 393; exchange for silver, 387, 389; Slovak, 392; sources of, 392, 413; supply of, 387, 393-
5; stocks, 383, 396, 401, 407; trade, 227-8, 388; from West Africa, 94-5, 98, 102-3, 116, 387-90, 393 Gold Coast, 95, 98, 100, 102 Goldschmidt, Levin, 59, 66, 67, 75, 80 Gomes, Diogo, 94 Gomes, Fernão, 97, 98, 99, 107, 111, 112 goods, 65, 81, 106, 119, 147, 156, 174-5, 214, 236, 251, 262, 265, 268, 315, 319-20, 354, 373, 375, 405, 477, 493-6, 499, 503, 507, 509, 541-2, 544, 546-7, 567-71; African, 106; agricultural, 539; basic, 376; bulk, 362; commercial, 546; community of, 560; concealment of, 95; cost of transport, 378; Crown, 105, 113; essential, 376; European, 404, 418; exhibiting, 350; export, 304, 478; flow of, 375-6; fungible, 42; goeden, 565; illicit trading, 95, 98, 105; immovable, 542; impartible, 561-2; imported, 166, 223; and income, 541; lists of, 157, 166; luxury, 74; manufactured, 122; movable/immovable, 218, 228, 258, 553, 559, 561; moving, 374, 378-379; partible, 543, 560-561; passage of, 148; pirated, 252; prices of, 156, 161; prohibited, 94; role of, 550; saleable, 228, 232; significance of, 565, 567; smuggling of, 95; status of, 538; trade, 146-7, 157-63, 165, 389, 405, 416, 419, 434; value of, 156, 161-3, 543; wholesale, 166; at Ypres, 329, 334 Gottleuba, 446 Gozo, 301, 306 grain, 49, 103-4, 122-3, 131, 137, 156, 160, 166, 265, 277, 297309, 350-79, 416, 496, 515,
INDEX
527, 539, 581; commodity, 299; corvées of, 261; consumption of, 368; demand for, 300, 303, 350, 354, 368-9; exports, 299302, 306; governments and, 304-8, 378; hierarchy of, 252-3; imports, 302-3, 305; markets, 300-1, 306, 354, 373; permits and licences, 300-1, 306; prices, 300-1, 352-8, 361, 378-9; purchases of, 319; procurement, 304-5, 307, 350, 351; production of, 299, 300, 352, 370-1, 376; reserves, 300; shortages, 303, 352; sale of, 300-1, 305, 307; sources of, 352, 362; stocks, 301; supply of, 370-6; tolls, 160; trade, 297-8, 300, 305-6, 350, 354, 356; yield, 368 salma (unit of weight), 299 Grand Erg Occidental (Great Western Sand Sea), 421 Grantham, 154 Grasse, 261, 264-5 Gratian, 43, 69 Gravelines, 200, 206 Great Yarmouth, 155 Greece, 135; lands, 402 Greenwich, meridian, 423 Gregory IX, Pope, 44 Grimsby, 173 Grispi, 276, 279 gros tournois (unit of currency), 313-4, 329 Gross National Product, 539 Großkogel, 448 Grummitt, David, 211, 220 Guinea, Upper, 99, 106, Guinea, 95, 99 Guinea Rivers, 109 Giovanni, Polo di, 426 Goslar, 442 Gurara, 421, 422, 435 Haddaéj, 435
625
Haf sid dynasty, 435; mints, 395-6, . . 413 Haim, Aion, 430 Hakí ém, 435 . Hainault, alliance with England, 189 Hamilton, Earl, 127 al-Hamma, 436 Hammel, Rolf, 588-9, 593-4 Hampshire, 235, 246 Hanse, 441, 450; salt fleets, 252 Hartz Mountains, 442, 445; copper, 447 Harzgerode (Hagenrode), 444-5 Hasele, William de, 517 Hatcher, John, 308 Haverfordwest, 238 Hawley, John, 251, 253 Heers, Jacques, 416 Henrique IV, King of Castile, 114 Henrique, Infante Dom (Henry the Navigator), 92-3, 96, 100, 114 Henry I, King of England, 150 Henry III, King of England, 169, 493 Henry V, King of England, 203 Henry VI, King of England, 196, 214 Henry VII, King of England, 2102, 215-8, 220, 223, 230-2, 242 Henry VIII, King of England, 211 Heraclea, 307 Hereford, 151-2, 182 Herlihy, David, 122, 143 Heron, John, 212-3, 217 Hettstedt, 445 Hijaz, 387, 402 Hindu Kush, 391 Hithe, 182 Hoffman, Richard, 508 Holland, 199, 207, 349, 469
626
INDEX
Honein, 411-2, 415, 419, 421, 424-6, 431, 433-6; copper, 4289, 431-2, 437-8, 441, 456; caravans, 428-9; Jews, 425, 429, 437 Hontiton, Count of, 195 Hora Svaté Kateršiny (St Katharinaberg), 446 Hornsea, 180 Horrox, Rosemary, 210 Hosenbachtal, 441 Hosenberg, 441 Hostiensis (Henry of Susa, c. 12001271), 44-6 household, Crown Prince, 114; income, 174-5; noble, 91; peasant, 268; royal, 91, 210-23, 226-32; urban, 119, 124, 127-8, 132, 138-9, 141, 143, 303, 491, 504, 507, 546, 560-1, 593 Hull, 239, 246 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 208 Hundred Years War, 188, 195; aristocracy, 234; benefits, 239; Burgundy, 190-1, 196-8, 209; costs, 190, 235-7; financing, 188-91, 208, 233; historiography, 188-9, 191, 233-5; impact, 233, 235, 238-9, 240, 253-4, 374; Low Countries, 190; outcome, 191; piracy and privateering, 239, 250; phases, 196; port towns, 233-5, 237-8, 2447, 249, 253; profits and losses, 187, 190, 235, 253; shipping, 236, 237, 241, 242, 244-5, 247, 249; sieges, 195, 198, 208; troops, 241; trade routes, 234 Hungary, copper, 392, 393, 438, 441, 450, 457; gold, 387, 3924; kingdom of, 392; Lower, 451; mines and mining, 438, 451 453-4; Upper, 453 Hunsrück, 441, 447 Hunt, Tony, 508
Huntingdon, 158, 168, 170, 180, 197 Iberia, 93, 122, 127, 245, 327, 331, 336-7, 340, 342-4, 346, 348, 428, 456 Ibiza, 429-30 ideology, modeling, 89-90; motivator, 91 Ieper, 336 Ifriqíya, 413, 415, 435 IJzer, 321, 324, 337, 339, 341, 342, 344-5, 347 Île-de-France, wine, 498, 524 Imperina, 457 income, 96, 113, 541, 560, 562, 580; consumers, 352-3; customs, 218, 228; fixed, 112; future, 554; guaranteed, 111-2; household, 141, 174-5; land, 91, 218, 231, 550; loan servicing, 555; market, 174; maximization, 111, 173, 364; monetary, 92; net, 115, 117; noble, 155, 224; overseas, 115, 117, 221, 227-8; per capita, 128; property, 556; rents, 91, 174; royal, 92, 115, 122, 127-8, 130, 132, 215-7, 226-8, 231; sources of, 92, 216, 219; toll, 149, 1545, 165, 167, 174, 276, 279, 291, 302, 482 India, 101, 108; trade, 231 Indian Ocean, 389; spice trade, 223 industry, central place, 311; centers of, 311, 538, 545; cloth, 207; Ghent, 545, 559, 569, 571; labor, 311; medieval, 311; rural, 368; shipping, 241; silver, 392; textile, 310-1, 323, 334; Ypres, 325-6, 334 industrial, capital, 71; cities, 310; crops, 580; infractions, 315; investment, 235; operations, 312; production, 349; protec-
INDEX
tionism, 320; statutes, 314; transformation, 234; uses, 369; Ypres, 310 inheritance, 205, 257-8, 265-6, 324, 464, 480, 561-71, 575 Inn Valley, 449, 450 Innsbruck, 448 interest, 45, 53, 61-5, 67, 69-71, 73-81, 83-5, 119, 132, 134-5, 141-4, 315, 473, 555 Inzegmir, 423 Ipswich, 146, 180-1, 246; Domesday Book, 146-8, 154, 163; leadership, 146; privileges, 168; tolls, 154-5, 158, 164 Irsigler, Franz, 596 Isabel the Catholic, Queen of Castile, 114 Isaurian Taurus, 389 Islam/Islamic, 76, 79, 82, 93, 259 Israel, 76 Italy, 133, 143, 327, 331, 332, 336-7, 340, 342-4, 346, 348, 456, 485, 570; balance of trade, 467, 469-70; central, 273; banking, 467; cities and towns, 349, 374-5; cartography, 424; coinage, 313; governments, 374-5; grain markers, 301; merchants, 327-9, 333, 392, 424, 426, 469, 470; money market, 481; northern, 298-9; sharecropping, 270, 274; sources, 328; textiles, 469; trade, 349, 416; transfer of coin, 470; wool, 468-70 Ixer, R. A., 440 Jargeau, 191 Jasov, 453 Jaume II, King of Aragon, 121-2, 125, 129 Jew(s), 74, 76-77, 82, 108, 180; aljama in Palma de Mallorca, 425; copper trade, 425, 431, 433-4, 437; Honein, 525, 437; Maghribi, 424-6; Majorcan,
627
424-6, 429, 430; merchants/ traders, 412, 424, 429, 433, 437; negotiators, 436; Tamentit, 425; Tuat, 425; Valencian, 429 Joan of Arc, 191-6 João II, King of Portugal (previously Crown Prince), 97, 100, 105, 114-5, 210, 221, 224, 232 John XXII, Pope, 56 John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, 198 John Lackland, King of England, 153 John, Duke of Bedford, 192, 208 Johnson, Dr Samuel, 353 Jonas, Ilona, 267 Juana, Crown Princess of Castile, 114 Judaism, 76-7, 82 jurisdiction, 43, 178, 222, 259-60, 263, 266, 281, 287, 290, 299, 304, 312, 319, 379, 544, 552, 562 Justinian, Emperor of Byzantium, 43, 45 Kahal de Tabelbala, 423-4 Kammerer-Seiler (firm), 392 Kandlerin, Gertrud, 449 Kapelle, 324 Kaérimíé merchants (tujjaér al-kaérim), 405 Karst, 450 Keene, Derek, 369, 370 Keller, Franz, 73, 74 Kent, 246 ibn Khalduén, Walíé al-Díén ‘Abd alé n Abué Zayd, 421, 423 Rahma . Kharaéj, 435 Killem, 324 King’s Lynn, 158, 168-70, 180 Kleinkogel, 448 Knight, J., 271
628
INDEX
Kolba, 452 Kortrijk, 325 Kraków, 441 Kraslice, 446 Kremnica, 451 Krk Island, 450 Kroll, Helmut, 591 Krusšné Hory, 446 Kulmbach, 447 Kupferberg, 445-7 Kutná Hora, 387 Kvarnericá Embayment, 450 labour, 276, 278, 292, 311, 368, 528; agricultural, 266; cost of, 442; division of, 297, 425; incentives, 291; labourintensive, 95 275; labourers, 138, 275-6; land/labour ratio, 279, 283; market, 334; services, 261; shortages, 138-9, 391; undersupply of, 276; works (corvées), 257 La Celle, Abbey of, 261-3 Lagny, 310 Lagos, 107 Lagos Lagoon, 109 Laguedoc, 263 Lancashire, 173 Lancaster, Duchy of, 215-7 land, 192, 197, 204, 207, 259, 278, 292, 299, 350, 352, 464, 552, 553, 561, 570-1; alienation of, 261, 265; allodial/nonallodial, 260, 555; area requirements, 368-73, 376; “bondage to,” 257-8, 266-7, 269; casamentum, 265; Church, 259-61, 263; colon, 259; commodification, 565; confiscations, 216, 221, 231;Crown, 220-1, 224, 231; fungibility, 569; holdings, 91; immovability, 539, 542; importance, 539, 542-3, 565; inheritance, 550-2, 558;
investment in, 63, 312, 334, 565, 569, 574; king’s, 214-8, 224; “land service”, 243; land/ labour ratio, 279, 283; landlords/landowners, 51, 275-85, 288-93, 364, 548; law, 552-3, 562, 565; market, 268; movable, 552; noble, 263, 269; ownership, 121, 144, 552, 565, 596; peasant and farm, 164, 258-60, 262, 265, 268, 273-4, 302, 362, 364, 368, 565; private, 259; products of, 546, 548; property rights, 275; public, 127; rents, 274, 543, 552-3, 555-6, 558, 561-2; rights to, 539, 552, 566; royal grants of, 220, 224; revenue, 215-6, 218-9; serfs, 262, 265-6; transactions, 574-5, 577-8, 580; urban, 572-3, 575, 579, 587; use, 365, 368-70, 547, 575, 577-80, 596, 597; value, 539, 575-6 Langdon, John, 374 Langholm, Odd, 51, 54, 55 Lannoy, Hugh de, 206, 208 Laon, 197 Lapaccio, Ser Antonio di, 432-4, 436 La Rochelle, 327 Lastig, Gustav, 65 Latham, R. E., 508 law, 41-58, 61-2, 64-7, 543, 546-7; canon, 43-50, 52-7, 61, 64, 67-9, 74-5, 78, 83; civil, 66, 70; commercial, 59, 66; common, 66; customary, 539, 541, 544, 553, 555, 562; English, 171, 177, 540, feudal, 92; Flemish, 315; Ghent, 547, 553, 559, 561-2, 565, 569-71; mining, 448; natural, 41, 43, 47-53, 55-8; navigation, 428; northern European, 538-9, 544; patrimony, 553; positive, 43, 47, 56; Portuguese, 94-9, 227; property, 539-40, 543-6, 559, 562;
INDEX
Roman, 43-7, 49, 51, 258, 2623, 266, 287, 538, 545; secular, 94, 555, 557 lead, 158-9, 194, 392-4, 440, 4445, 453, 510 leases and leasing, 48, 96-8, 106-9, 113, 115, 154-5, 273, 278, 320, 566, 589; leaseholders (trautadores), 106-7 legal, analysis, 61; arrangements, 65; barriers, 96, 297; change, 545; collection, 492, 518; concepts, 54; construction, 62, 64; controls, 308; customs, 324; defence, 70; development, 64; dissolution, 412; distinctions, 259; doctrine, 168; evidence, 569; expression, 565; forms, 491; heritage, 287; history and historians, 543, 559; illegal activities, 253-4; imagination, 565; jurisdiction, 544; liability, 66; materials, 493, 517; mechanisms, 563; meaning, 564, 571; opinion, 546; patterns, 442; perspectives, 66; profession, 293; protection, 85; records, 491, 538, 542, 564; reforms, 232; regimes, 543; rights, 169; scholars, 64, 67; sources, 571; standard, 47, 56; status, 553; strength, 95; systems, 43, 266, 324; tender, 313; theory, 168, 545; tradition, 559 Leicester, 168, 519, 524 Leiden, 380; grain prices, 354-61; markets, 361 Leighton Buzzard, 153 Leonor, Queen of Portugal, 114 Lérins, Abbey of, 258, 263 Leuprandus, 273-4, 276-8 Levant, 384, 404, 438, 456, 472 Lewes, 149, 179 Licata, 299, 305, 307 licences and licensing, 85, 96-9, 106, 112, 174, 250, 306
629
Lier, 356, 358, 361, 380 Liguria, 143 Lila, Joham de, 109 Lille, 310, 326, 329, 334, 337, 339, 341, 343-4, 346-7; castellany, 320; constitution, 324; fairs, 330, 332; government, 313; law, 552; merchants, 332 Lincoln, 154, 171, 182 Lincolnshire, 154, 246 Lindsey (Lincs.), 468 Lipari Island, 307 Lisbon, 97-8, 210, 225, 227, 231; Ribeira Palace, 228, 231; São Jorge Castle, 228; Liverpool, 246 loan (mutuum), 41-2, 48-50, 52-3, 57 loans, 59, 61-5, 73-5, 77, 81, 83-5, 131, 133-4, 144, 212, 219, 268, 281, 307, 315, 333, 461, 464-5, 472-5, 477, 543, 555-7 Loire River, 191, 193, 259 Lombard, Peter, 44 Lombard Street, 467 Lombarda (galley), 427 Lombards, 315 Lombardy, towns, 374 London, 155, 159, 162, 179 181-2, 240, 246, 349, 363, 369, 370-1, 375; banking, 467; bills of exchange, 478; Borromei, 4648, 471, 475, 478-83, 485-8; firewood, 369, 371, 373; food supply, 372; galleys, 468-9; international trade; 470; Italian imports, 469-70; Mercers, 4778, merchants, 468, 477, 502, 533; revenues, 218; textiles, 470, 499, 519, 524; Tower of, 220; wool 468-9 Lorenzo, Stoldo di, 428 Lorini, Antonio di Filippo, 426-7 Lösch, August, 363-5
630
INDEX
loss (economic), 62, 66, 73, 102, 128, 184, 190, 244, 403, 434, 466, 473, 481-6, 539; of business, 174; of capital, 280; emergent, 83; of income, 174; of property, 94-5; of revenue, 173-4 Lostwithiel, 245 Louis IX, King of France, 313 Louvain, 351, 380, grain prices, 356, 359-61 Lovell, Sir Thomas, 212-3 Low Countries, 188-9, 198, 209, 327, 336, 338, 340, 342-3, 346377, 570; artillery, 200; balance of trade, 467; banking, 478; Calais, 206; bills of exchange, 477; citizens of, 208; copper, 419, 441, 456; English campaigns, 253; farmers, 372; grain, 353-4, 356, 361, 373; heating fuel, 371; Hundred Years War, 190; markets, 352, 362; market integration, 349; rebellions, 190, 209; southern, 350-1; towns, 350, 375; textiles, 477, 483 Lübeck, 441, 572, 574, 579, 588, 593-6; Alfstrasse/Schüsselbuden, 582, 590, 592-4, 598-607; archeological evidence and excavations, 582, 587, 594, 595, 598-607; cesspits, rubbishpits and wells, 581-2, 598-600; citizens, 580, 596; city of, 575; elites, 576, 580, 593; Engelsgrube, 590; gänge, 573; gardens and gardeners, 572, 575, 577-9, 594, 596-7; guild (Willkür der Gärtner), 578, 581; HeiligenGeist-Hospital, 590; holdings (Güter), 574; Holsten, 577; hops, 575-8, 580, 584; 586, 590-1, 595-6, 600; Horegenbeke, 573; Hundestrasse, 582, 584-9, 591-2, 594, 598-607; inhabitants, 583; Landwehr, 573-
4, 579; Lübeckisches Urkundenbuch (LUB), 574-6; Marienkirche, 593; market, 593; Mengstrasse, 593; merchants, 333; Mühlentor, 576; Niederstadtbücher, 577; Oberstadtadtbücher/regesten, 577, 587; population, 573; produce, 579, 5801, 590-2, 595; Rathaus, 593; Rosengarten-Tünkenhagen, 588; Soltenwisch, 577; species, 582, 584-6, 590-2, 595, 600-7; St Johanniskloster, 582-4, 586, 590-2, 594, 598-607; Tileke Warendorp, 578; “Van den Hoppenlande,” 578; walls, 573, 577, 579, 597; Wette Gartenbücher, 575, 577, 580 Mubietová (Lybetha, Libethen), 451-3, 455 Lucca, 276, 280, 328, 466 Luporini, A., 276 Luther, Martin, 42, 71 Luxembourg, Jean de, 194-6 luxury, 567, cloth, 477; eating, 584; goods, 74, 331, 353, 400; imported, 542; movables, 566 Lynn, 246 Maastricht, 441 Macaire, Pierre, 416 Mâconnais, 259 Madeira Island, 228 manufacture and manufacturing, 275, 406; cloth, 322; goods, 122; equipment, 543; luxury articles, 400; techniques, 503 Marlgavere, Jan van, 556 Maggiore, Lake, 461 Maghrib, 387, 407, 413-6, 436; alMaghrib al-Aqsa . é , 387; commerce/trade, 415-8 425-6, 432; commodities, 417; copper and copper trade, 420, 427-8; gold, 395-6; imports, 418; demand, 432; Jews, 424-5, 430, 436;
INDEX
markets, 413, 418; payments, 432; ports, 411, 419; regional economies, 415, 418; western, 413 Maillane, 261 Maio Island, 110 Majorca, 135, 411-2, 416-7, 425; conversos, 424, 433-4; copper market and trade, 412-3, 416, 419-21, 426-8, 431-4, 436-8, 454-5; Datini branch, 418-9, 420, 426, 432; flood, 430; intermediaries, 418; Italians, 433; Jews, 411, 424, 426, 429, 433-4, 337; Maghrib, 427, 429, 431; merchants, 411, 419 424, 427-9, 432, 433; money, 421; notaries, 426; “old Christians,” 425, 426, 433; portolans, 424; records, 421; tin 420 Majorca, Kingdom of, 416 Malborough, 169 Malfante, Antonio, 412 Mallorca, 417; Ciutat de (mod. Palma), 425, 427, 430 Malta, 297, 301, 302, 306-8; cotton, 306; government, 304-6; grain shortages and imports, 303-4; Sicilian grain, 302-3, 307; Turkish invasion, 303 Malta Islands, 297-8, 301 Manchester, 181 Manresa, 119-144 Mansfeld, 445 Manuel I, King of Portugal, 100-1, 105, 111, 114, 210-1, 222-4, 227-8, 230-1 Ma‘qil, Arab nomad group, 434-5 March, estates, 218 March, Mr Thomas of, 468 Marchione, Bartolomeu, 107-8 Marck, 202 Margaret, Countess of Flanders, 313
631
Maria, Queen of Portugal, 114 Marínid dynasty, 435; mints, 3956, 413 market integration, 297-8, 308, 349-52, 354, 361-2, 373, 376, 378-9 marketing, 174, 269, 308, 374, 578 market(s), 70, 78, 85, 99, 105, 111, 113, 150, 163, 166, 168, 172-3, 300, 325, 351-3, 362-3, 368, 376, 378-9, 387, 389-90, 396, 399 405, 407, 491, 507, 544, 553, 558-9, 571, 579, 596; access to, 297; African, 117; capital, 275, 320, 326, 331, 334, 336; centre, 363, 367; city/town, 147, 151, 153, 172, 579, 593; commodity, 308, 305; conditions, 399, 405, 408; copper, 412, 418-22, 427-30, 4323, 436-8, 453, 456; credit, 67, 133, 134, 268, 324, 327; development, 61, 379; disorders, 383; distant, 352; economy, 80, 538, 564; environment, 81, 405; equilibrium, 383; exchange, 484, 538; fees, 154; feudal, 121; forces, 375; gold, 383, 391, 396, 399, 413; grain, 300-301, 306, 350, 352-4, 356, 358, 361, 368, 373; hierarchies, 311; integrated, 350, 352, 373, 378; internal, 298; internationalization of, 362; labour, 334; land, 268; late medieval, 352; local, 354; logic, 568; marketplace, 78, 148, 165, 194, 379, 407, 578; money, 467, 470-1, 481; networks, 297, 399; organization, 373; prices, 401; regional, 351, 362; religious, 84; research, 101; revenues and income, 153-5, 174; rights, 173, 177; royal, 105; rural, 165, 168, 175; situation, 407; society, 544, 571; specie, 383, 387, 389, 391-2, 396, 399, 409;
632
INDEX
speculation, 547; stock, 70; structure, 389, 413; student, 495; terms, 568; tolls, 153-4, 171, 177; towns, 153; traders, 165, 174; universal, 391; urban, 350, 352, 374, 595-6; value/s, 99, 153, 544, 565; wine, 121; wool, 163, “world market,” 321, 330 marriage, 44, 123, 131, 258, 262, 324, 538, 541, 543, 548, 552, 560-4, 570-1 Marseille, 258, 259 Marseille, count of, 261 Marseille, viscounts of, 263 Martin I, King of Aragon, 300-1, 306 Martin V, Pope, 464 Martínez, Manuel Sánchez, 129 Marx, Karl, Capital, 41-2, 71 al-Maqríézíé, Taqíé al-Díén Ahmad b. . , ‘Alíé al-Qaédir b. Muhammad . 400, 404 Masschaele, James, 374 Mattei, Piero, 430 Mauritania, 98, 423 Mayer, Joseph, 508 Mazara, 307 Mazzuoli, Niccolò di Giovanni, 431-4, 436-7, 456 McFarlane, K. B., 190, 233, 235 Mdina, 302 Measham, 181 Mešdešnec, 446 Mešdešný Potok (Kufurbach, Kupperbach), 454 Medici (family), 392, 465, 467; bank, 467, 484 Mediterranean Sea, 274, 384, 389; copper; 419, 455; gold, 399; ports, 399; specie markets, 399; trade, 62-3, 298, 413, 415, 456; western, 413, 415, 417, 419, 445, 447, 455
Melanchton, Philip, 42 Melcombe, 246 Melo, Fernão de, 111 Meneses, Duarte de, 114 merchandise, 98, 101-5, 111, 113, 117, 152, 157, 162, 170, 242, 429, 437, 472, 477 merchant(s), 57, 68-9, 79, 84, 16375, 213, 235, 239, 240, 251, 301, 305, 310, 321, 331-2; Balearic, 412, 418-9; banker, 471-2, 493-4, 510; banking houses, 328, 353, 378, 394, 403, 420; Berber, 103; Bruges, 334; Burgos, 327; Catalan, 305, 476; Chinese, 391; Christian, 412, 425; converso, 412; credit, 431, 472; English, 167, 169, 171-2, English, 329; European, 405; Fez, 434; Flanders, “Germanic,” 327; Florentine, 107, 469; foreign, 166-7, 300, 484; France, northern, 314; Genoese, 407, 434; guilds, 75; international, 69; Italian, 314, 328, 433, 469-70; Jewish, 411-2, 424, 429, 437; Kaérimíé, 405; Lisbon, 97; local, 165, 170-2, 213, 220, 313; London, 477-8; long-distance, 163; Lübeck, 583, 588-9, 593-5, Majorcan, 411, 424-5, 429, 432; Merchant Adventurers, 477; Milanese, 469; Montpellier, 312; Muslim, 391, 429; native, 23; Nürnberg, 454; private, 105; rights and privileges, 168-72, 175; seafarer, 582; ships and fleet, 236, 242; Southampton, 468; Spisš, 453; and taxation/tolls, 166-75; of/in town, 165, 168; Tlemcen, 434; Tuscan, 411, 419; Valencian, 419, 429; Venetian, 426; wealthy; 163, 165, 173-4, 594; wholesale, 174, wool, 69, 163, 175; Ypres, 322, 327-8, 332 Mesen, 331, 332; fairs, 330
INDEX
Messina, 299, 300, 306 Meung-sur-Loire, 191 mezzadria (sharecropping), 273, 278, 280 Michele, Benedetto di, 427 Micheli, Giovanni di Michele, 466, 486 Micheli, Niccolò, 486 Middle East, gold, 399; silver, 389; specie markets, 396 Middleburg, 468, 470 Middlesex, county, 372 Midlands, 468 Milan, 470; Borromei, 460-1, 4656, 468, 485-6, 488; merchants and merchant houses, 469; wool, 468 Milet, Jean, 197 Miller, Joseph C., 89 mint(s) and minting, 379; 383, 387; 389, 396, 400, 413, 513; sid, 396, 413; French, 313; Haf . . Marínid, 395-6; 413; Mamluk, 400; Maghrib, 387; Philip the Good, 484 Mittelharz, 444 Mixtow (family), 253; John, 252; Mark, 252 Mnísšek nad Hnilcom (Meczenzéf), 454 Moceniga (galley), 427 Modena, 424 monetarism, 187 monetized economy, 266; demonetizing, 401 monetary, assignments to royal household, 213, 219; confusion, 483; disorders, 407; income, 92; mechanisms, 291; payments, 241; problems, 379, 482; reform, 483; revaluation, 484; surplus, 228, 231; stability, 484; stock, 404 409; system, 399, 402-403, 415; value, 50;
633
money, 113, 128, 153, 176, 225, 313, 402, 471, 475-9, 484, 531, 533-4, 548, 556, 559; annuity, 133; borrowing, 81, 476, 479; changers, 431, 496, 505, 512-3; collection of, 139, 140, 225; conscience, 68, 79; disbursement of, 213; flows, 68, 415; function of, 42; incentive, 192; investment of, 75; king’s, 197, 211-212; lending and loan, 42, 48, 76-7, 316, 327, 472, 478, 502, 555; liability for, 220; making, 416; market, 467, 4701, 481; need for, 128, 130, 192, 502; owing, 121, 502; Parisian, 496; payments, 575; prize, 253; purpose, 74; raising, 123, 132, 151, 238; receipts, 116; royal households, 212, 216-7, 220, 226, 231-2; sources of, 216-8, 228-31, 238, 466, 469; supply, 151, 314; transfer, 113, 219, 253, 476-7; use of, 41, 219, 222, 226, 228, 320, 437, 556 Monmouthshire, 154 monopoly, 81, 96-7, 99-100, 111, 121, 244, 300, 374, 405 Monroy, Gonsalvo, 306 Monstrelet, Enguerran, 194-6, 200, 202 montes pietatis, 79 Monti, Richard, 508 Montmajour, Abbey of, 258 Montpellier, merchants, 312-3; Monzón, 139 morabatin (unit of currency), 139 Mornevech, Reinekin, 333 Morocco, 98, 113, 413, 415; armed forces, 435; markets, 421 Mostaganem, 436 Moulouya River, 434-5 Mueller, Reinhold C., 471,
634
INDEX
Mührenberg, Doris, 587, 589 municipality/municipal, 133; accounts, 314; appointments, 304; authorities, 305; council, 303-304; documents, 182-3; finance, 129; fiscal system, 128; officials, 148, 154, 300-1; royal, 133; universitas, 304-8; taxes, 123 Munro, John, 176, 187-8, 190, 191, 233, 411, 455, 477 Münzer, Hieronymus, 97 murage, 151, 155, 162, 167, 16971, 175-6, 182-3, 243 Murphy, Margaret, 368-70 Nadal, Pere, 141 Naples, 301, 424 nave (ship type), 429, 431, 433 Nefzaoua, 436 Nelson, Benjamin, 59, 80, 82 Nelson, R. R., 272 Netherlands, firewood, 369; towns, 351 Neudorf, 445 Neusohl (Banská Bystrica), 392 New Institutional Economics, 2702 New World, 254 Newark, 183 Newcastle, 150, 155, 158, 170-1, 179, 239, 246 Nice, 261 Nieuwpoort, 319 Niger Bend, 387, 396, 413, 421, 456 Niger Delta (Rios dos Escravos), 107-10 Nigro, Giampiero, 418, 458 nobles and nobility, 91, 113-4, 121, 205-6, 221, 223, 234, 260, 306, 507-9, 539, 542, 565 Noonan, John T., 54
Noordschoote, 324 Norfolk, 246 Normandy, 203, 253 North, D. C., 270 North Sea, 349-50, 354 Northhampton, 154, 182 Northumberland, 246 Norwich, 158-9, 162, 168, 171, 180 Nottingham, 468 Nová Banša, 451 Novalesa, Abbey of, 259 Novo Brdo, 393 Nunes Jorge, 110 Nürnberg, copper, 456; corporations, 392; merchants, 392, 454 Ober Enns Valley, 448 Oberfranken, 447 Oberharz, 442, 444-5 Öblarn, 448 Odon, João de, 111 Okehampton, 153, 179 Oran, 436 ore minerals, arsenopyrite, 452, 454; auriferous quartz, 391; cuprite, 452; chalcopyrite, 4523; fahlore, 439-40, 447-8; enargite, 439; galena, 454; siderite, 452; sphalerite, 454; sulphide ores, 442, 452; Kupferkies, 447; tennantite, 439, 449, 452-3; tetrahedrite, 439, 449, 452-4 Orléans, 191 Ormuz, 391 Orwell Haven, 246 Oswestry, 154 Oudenaarde, 325 Oued Guir, 415 Oued Messaud, 423 Oued Saoura, 415, 423 Oued Tuat, 423
INDEX
Oujda, 435 Oundle, 181 overseas expansion, 89; Africa, 90; economy, 89; Portuguese, 89, 92, 113-4, 118 Oxford, 491-3, 518-9, 524 Oxfordshire, 468 Oye, 202 Pachs (brothers), 425, 432-3; Nicolau de, 432-3 Padua, 462 Palastrello, Alessandro da, 486-7 Palermo, 299 Pamir, 391 Panigarola, Arrighino, 475, 483 Pánský Diel, 452 Paolo, Paoluccio di Maestro, 427 Parco Nazionale Dolomiti Bellunesi, 447 Pardo, Miguel, 105 Pardo, Pere, 432 Parigi, B., 276 Paris, 47, 193, 203, 349, 354, 363, 371, 491, 493-4, 498; GrandPont, 494, 496, 510, 512-3; Îlede-la-Cité, 494; Latin Quarter, 494; Left Bank, 494; linen trade, 506; metal trades, 503; money-changers, 496, 512; Notre-Dame, 498, 516; Porte St-Lazare, 495, 510; Right Bank, 494; rue Galande (clos de Garlande), 494, shops and shopping, 504, 506, 508-10 partnerships, commercial, 60-6, 75, 85, 106, 109-11, 316, 322, 4545, 461, 464-5, 468, 484, 486, 488; commenda, 62, 74; societas maris (sea-loan), 62, 66, 74; dare ad proficuum maris, 62-3, 74; dare ad portandum in compagniam (land-loan), 65; foenus nauticum (sea-loan), 74 Patay, 192
635
patrimony, 121, 132, 144, 205, 215, 228, 538, 540-6, 552-3, 555-9, 564-5, 570-1 patronage, 233, 245 pavage, 151, 167, 170, 176, 182-3 Pay, Henry, 252, 253 peasant/peasants, 163-6, 172, 174, 191, 258-69, 539, 565; bondage, 265, 269; and capital, 268; and credit/creditors, 268-9; dependent, 266, 268; free, 259, 263-6, 302; freehold, 260; land, 258-60, 262; and lords, 266-8; obligations, 265; rich, 260; servitude, 257, 260; status, 263; tenure, 262, 268 Pedro, Infante of Portugal, 92 Pedro I, King of Castile, 136 137, 140 Pegolotti, Francesco Balducci, 4201, 438, 448 Pere II, King of Aragon, 120 Pere III, King of Aragon, 135, 136, 141 Pérez, María Dolores López, 416 Péronne, 326 Persian Gulf, 391 Perugia, 328 Peterborough, 159, 181, 183 Petrarch, 54 Pettauer Weg, 450 Pevensey, 153 Philip, Count of Alsace, 324 Philip Augustus, King of France, 506 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, 187, 191-3, 196-8, 200, 203, 204-6, 208-9, 482-4 Piacenza, 487 Picardy, 197, 199, 326-7, 330-3, 336-7, 340-1, 343-4, 346-7; cities, 320; merchants, 327; troops, 205 Piesky (Sandberg), 452
636
INDEX
Pinto, Duarte Rodriguez, 110 piracy, 94-5, 99, 239, 250-4 Pisa, 63, 65-6, 280, 460 Pistoia, 143 plague, 119, 126, 128, 130, 134-5, 137-9, 142-3, 283, 442 Plymouth, 239, 244-6, 249, 250; harbour, 245 Podbrezová, 451 Podlipa, 452 Pomana, 451 Poland, copper, 438, 447, 450, 456; grain, 354; lead, 392 Pomerania, 363 Ponická Lehôtka, 453 Poniky (Drienok, Predbane), 452-3 pontage, 151, 167, 170, 175-6, 183 Poole, 252 Poperinge, 321, 322 population, 111, 210, 272-5, 2778, 282-3, 285, 287, 290, 292, 302, 311, 350, 363-6; nomad, 413; overpopulation, 391; rural, 267-9, 368-70; taxes, 127, 207, 221, urban, 119, 124, 126, 128, 137-9, 142-5, 248, 301, 303-4, 311-2, 321, 325, 363-76, 573, 597 Portinari, Bernardo, 484 Portsmouth, 240, 245 Portugal, 89-118, 188, 210-2, 220232, 252, 428, 456; and Africa, 89-90, 93-7, 99, 117; alfândegas, 101, 229; almoxarifes, 108, 110, 225-6, 321; almoxarifados, 101, 227-9; Aposentador Mor, 227 231; aposentadorias, 226; Armazém, 101,103; assentamento, 114; Contador da Casa, 222; caravel, 249; Casa da Ceuta, 100; Casa dos Contos, 223, 226, 231; Casa dos Escravos (Slave House), 101, 108-9, 113; Casa de Guiné (Guinea House), 100, 102-3, 105,
113; Casa de Guiné e Mina, 1003, 105, 113-6, 229; Casa da Índia (India House) e Guiné, 101, 228-9, 231-2, casamento(s), 114; Cortes, 99, 111-2, 115, 221, 227; Crown, 89-117, 221-231; dízima, 223; dominium, 93; Escrivão da Câmara, 222; expansion, 89, 92, 113, 114, 221; expenditures, 114; fazenda, 92, 100-1, 224-5, 228; fazenda de Guiné, 100; Feitoria das Ilhas, 101; kings of, 221, 232; legislation, 92-5, 97-8, 224-7; moradias, 210, 222, 228-30; nobility, 113; and the Papacy, 93-4; relations with non-Christians, 94; orçamentos (budget estimates), 115; quittances (cartas de quitações), 116, 212, 221-2; regimentos, 103; revenues, 92, 95-6, 101, 111-117, 221-3; royal court, 210, 228; royal fazenda, 92, 100-1, 224-6, 231; royal household, 210-1, 222, 226-7, 230-2; revenues, 225; royal power, 92; reconquista, 92; sisa, 107, 223-5, 227, 229, 231; state capitalism, 90, 111; taixas, 104-5; tença(s), 114; Tesoureiro Mor, 222; trautadores, 106; Vedor da Casa, 222; Vedores da Fazenda, 225-7, 231 vintena, 110; Vintena House, 109 Postan, M. M., 190, 233, 235 pound (unit of weight), 162-3, 165-6, 431, 455; Majorcan, 421, 433 pound (unit of currency), 276, 465, 481-2, 554; Artois (Artesian), 313; Barcelona, 122, 1245, 127-8, 132, 137, 141; English/sterling, 153-5, 161-2, 192, 194, 214-7, 219-20, 225, 227-8, 231, 238, 250-3, 312, 314, 327, 329, 466-70, 501; Flanders (Flemish), 313, 466,
INDEX
471-2, 474-6, 478-84, 486; Milanese, 487; tournois, 327-8 poundage, 216-8, 220, 252 power, 91; bargaining, 270, 283, 390; baronial, 163; civic governments, 375; comital, 260, 262; financial/capital, 68, 75; legislative and jurisdictional, 92, 96, 98, 260, 263; noble, 375; political, 92, 100, 114, 239, 374, 375; purchasing, 404, 406; royal, 92, 96, 98, 100, 114, 117, 375; seigneurial, 262-3, 266; state agents and officials, 140; of subjects, 114, of wealth, 564-6 Pozzobonello, Arrighino di Ambrogio, 488; Francesco di Arrighino, 388 Prato, 411, 428, 458 precious metals, 49, 383, 387, 389; 399, 404, 413, 452-3 precious stones, 98, 513 prerogatives, royal, 112, 231; seigneurial, 262 prescription (praescriptio) (Roman law contract), 45-6 prestige, 54, 69, 92, 212, 453, 465 price, just (iustum pretium), 78, 79 prices, 373, 378, 564, 568; commodities, 111, 156-7, 161-4, 300-1, 306, 305, 352-62, 379, 383, 392-3, 399-403, 407, 420, 495-6, 501-3, 531-3, 580; copper, 419-20, 427-8, 437; correlation, 353-63, 378; control and regulation, 224, 231, 300, 304-5, 361; data, 156, 161, 355, 362, 376, 378, 380; fixed, 99, 104; gold, 383-7, 389, 391, 393-7, 399-400, 407; inelastic, 353, 363; land, 575; levels, 126; market, 70; movement and trends, 122 127-8, 142, 161, 164, 275, 306, 351-4, 361, 376, 379, 396, 399, 404-5; taixa
637
(Crown price list), 104-5; and transport, 373 Príncipe Island, 110 Pršísecšnice, 446 privateering, 234, 239, 250-2, 254 privileges, 165, 168, 461; access, 550; charter of, 96, 333, 545; Cape Verde Islanders, 96-7, 99; commercial, 172, 308; court, 227; economic, 308; executive, 112; exemption, 168-70, 175; Fernão Gomes, 107; fiscal, 308; merchant, 167, 171; monopoly, 121; institutional, 299; Ipswitch, 146; local, 150; recognition of, 171; royal, 121, 140, 155, 306; São Tomeans, 111; social, 571; spouse, 562; toll, 170; towns, 168, 170, 177, 183, 235, 244; trade, 306-7 products, 275, 291, 305, 389, 407, 504, 507, 546; cloth, 477; copper, 420, 438, 445, 449 producers, 308, 373, 567; cloth, 470; copper, 420; of fuel, 371; of gold, 392, 394; peasant, 163 production, 363, 376, 503; agricultural, 352, 376; costs, 363-6, 376; copper, 438, 445, 452, 454-5; crop, 364, 548; for export, 545; firewood, 369, 371; food, 349, 368-9, 371, 373; fuel, 373; garden, 572, 577-80; gold, 391-4, 407; grain, 299300, 303, 352, 370-1, 376; heating supplies, 369; industrial, 349; lack of uniformity in, 364; levels of, 393; regions of, 364; patterns of, 368; perfume, 98; silver, 387; technical coefficients, 291; wheat, 299; wood, 370; wool, 163; zones of, 364 productive, basis, 543; capacity, 541; life, 541 productivity, 297; of assets, 571; agricultural regions, 375; of forests, 369; of gardens, 580;
638
INDEX
land, 372, 539; overseas regions, 375; soil, 376 profit and profitability, 41-2, 48, 50-1, 57, 62-4, 66, 69, 73-4, 76, 80, 94, 96-7, 99, 100, 1056, 111-4, 174, 187, 190, 214, 216, 218, 220-3, 225-8, 230-1, 235, 239, 249-54, 300, 308, 356, 363-4, 378, 389, 400, 405, 418, 428, 432, 461, 465-6, 470, 472-5, 481-8, 512-4, 564-5, 568 property, 45, 49, 62, 538, 544, 559, 565, 570, 573, 590; allodium, 541; alienating, 324, 565; assumptions about, 565; category, 539; circulation of, 538; community, 324-5, 560; confiscation, 94; debt, 555-6; definitions, 538-9; fines, 231; forms of, 565; fungible, 564; “goods” (goeden), 565; immovable (immobilia, immeubles, immeublen, unbewegliche Güter, heritages, erve, Erbgüter), 324, 538-48, 550, 555-7, 559, 562, 565, 569, 571; impartible, 544, 547, 552, 556, 559, 561-2, 569-70; inheritance, 324, 555; joint, 560; law, 539-541, 543-4, 546, 553, 559, 562; loss of, 94-95; marital, 543, 559, 562, 564; meaning of, 564, 567; movable (mobilia, meubles, meublen, bewegliche Güter, cateux, cateylen, catheylen, Fahrnis, chattel), 234, 538-54, 557-9, 561-2, 564-6, 569; patrimony (erve), 538, 540-546, 5523, 555-9, 564-5, 570-1; partible (deelbar), 543, 547, 551-3, 5582; perpetually producing, 541; personal, 236, 538, 540, 553-4; private, 215, 540, 545; relations, 564; real, 64, 557; rents, 556, 558; rights, 258, 266, 275, 540, 559; residual, 561; taxation, 121; transfers of, 538, 543 Protestantism, 77, 80, 84
Provence, 257-9, 261, 262-4, 2669; maritime trade, 415 Provence, counts of, 262 Provins, 310; fairs, 310 Ptuj, 450 Puget-Theniers, 265, 267-9 Pukanec, 451 Puritans, 74 quayage, 176, 183 Quint, Antoni, 425, 434 quintal (unit of weight), 429-30, 432-3, 436-7, 456 396 Quseir, . Rachfahl, Felix, 68, 71, 73, 74 Rabat, 302, 303 Raimund Berenger V, 262 Raimund Berenger III, 262 Rammelsberg, 442, 444 Ramon Folc IV, Viscount of Cardona, 120 rationalization (social process), 59, 61, 76, 80, 82; economic, 77-9, 82; ethical, 78 Rau, Virginia, 225 Rayy, 391 reconquista, 92 Redolho, Calliro, 107-8 Reformation, 83 regalian rights, 91, 112 Reggane, 421, 423-4 real/réis (unit of currency), 107-12, 114-6, 224-5, 227-8 Remann, Monika, 594 rent, 51, 91, 270, 273-4, 278-9, 319, 552, 553, 556-8, 562, 565, 569, 575; African regions/commodities, 98, 101, 106-10; agreements, 48; annuity, 64, 319; bail à rente, 556; collection of, 225-6, 570; contracts, 274; erfelijke rente, 556; “eerve, eeveliike rente,” 556; erfrenten, 557;
INDEX
farm, 281, 291, 364; gardens, 575, 577, 580; houses, 573; impartible, 556; income, 174; inheritance, 558; land, 543, 553, 566, 575, 577, 596; lijfrente (rente viagère), 557-8, 561; losrenten, 557; payments/charges, 49, 552, 556, 566; peasants, 165, 266; perpetual, 62 64, 553, 556-8; redeemable, 557, 562; rentable, 48, 50; rente foncière, 556; rentes à prix d’argent, 556; rente constituée, 556, 558; rentier class, 570; rent-seeking behaviour, 81; royal, 216, 224-5, 228; secured (besette renten), 557, 562; tenurial, 557 rentables, 48-52 revenue, extraordinary, 130; market, 155, 172; maximization, 94-5, 117, 174; noble/seigneurial, 91, 117; nominal, 126-8 ordinary/regular, 123, 134, 140; Papal, 470; royal, 91-2, 95-6, 101, 105-7, 109-15, 117, 121, 127, 214-32, 298; tolls, 147, 151-6, 167, 174; urban, 122-8, 130-4, 139-40, 145, 152, 172-3, 237-8, 541, 577; village, 267 Rexpoede, 322, 324 Reynolds, Susan, 508 Rheims, 203 Rhineland, 596; gold, 393 Rhine River, 259 Richard III, King of England, 210, 215 Richardson, H. G., 492-3, 518 Richardson, W. C., 212 Richtárová, 452 Ridolfi, Lorenzo, 55 Riemann, F. K., 597 Riera, stream, 430 Rio Primeiro, 109
639
risk, 62-5, 83, 95, 109, 280, 439, 565, 571 ritl . (unit of weight), 400, 408 Rocchi, Ambrogio Lorenzi de’, 427 Rodrigues, António, 110 Rodriguez, Graviel, 110 Rodriguez, Nicolão, 110 Rogers, Clifford, 189 Romanus Pontifex (Papal Bull, 1455), 93-4 Romney, 180 Roover, Raymond de, 467-70, 481 Rotterdam, 199 Rozšnšava, 453 Rubin, Barbara Blatt, 508 Rudabánya, 453 Rudnšany, 454 Ruffini, Agostino, 483 Runn, lake, 441 rural, 125; areas, 311, 324, 371, 375; artisans, 322; creditors, 498; domains, 321; environs, 325; growers, 595; hinterland, 165; industry, 368; land, 312; markets, 165, 168, 175; people, 370; population, 368; proletariat, 71; properties, 570; servants, 523; settlements, 302; urban-rural relationship, 572, 595-6 Rye, 246 Sachsenberg, 445 Sahara, 412, 415; central, 387; copper, 411, 441, 456; northern, 421, 426; transSaharan trade, 98, 411-3, 416, 418, 429, 438, 441, 447, 456; trade routes, 394, 396; westcentral, 413-5 Sahel, 394 Saigerprozess, 392; Saigerhütte, 392 salvation economy, 60, 79-80 Saint Louis, King of France, 262-3
640 Saint-Bertin, Abbey of, 199 Saint-Omer, 199, 313, 326, 328; constitution, 324; fairs, 330 Saint-Quentin, 326-7 Salisbury, 216 Salon, 263 Salviati (family), 467 Salzach, 447 Samaran, Colette, 265 Samuel, 431 San Miniato al Tedesco, 460-1 San Salvatore, Abbey of, 273, 276 Sanchez, Manuel, 123 Sandwich, 180, 239, 246, 470 Sangerhausen Revier, 445 Santarém, 211 Santiago Island, 110 Santiago de Compostella, 244, 248-50 São Tomé Island, 99, 110-1 São Jorge da Mina, 99, 101-3, 110, 221 Sardinia, 129, 135-6 Savoy, 265 Saxony, 387 449; ores, 442, 445 Scarborough, 154, 176, 182, 238, 239 Scheldt River, 330 Scheler, August, 508 Schladming, 448 Schleswig-Holstein, 573 Schmoller, Gustav, 71 Schwabboden, 449 Schwaz, 449, 457 Schwaz-Brixlegg, 448 Sciacca, 299, 300, 307 Scotland, 188; wars with England, 239 Selonnet, 261 Semmeringstraße, 450 Senegal, 94, 108,
INDEX
seisin, 168-169, 171 Senj (Segna), 450 Serbia, 393; gold, 393; mining, 394 serfdom, 257-258, 262, 266 serfs, 258, 262-264 Sersanders, Jan, 556 servitude, 257-268 Seyne, 261 al-Shaé‘baéníé, Yashbak, 401, 403, 408 sharecropping, see mezzadria Sherborne, J. W., 235 shipbuilding, 240, 245, 248, 253, 551 shipping, 233-5, 244-5, 350-3, British, 248; cost of, 237, 373; copper, 419; “Councils of Shipping,” 240; Crown reliance on, 240; depots, 175; economies, 245; enemy, 250; expansion of, 248, 349; experts, 2401; foreign, 251; industry, 241; investment, 250; lanes, 245; late medieval, 239; to Maghrib, 429; mercantile, 236-7, 249; and Parliament, 241; trade, 252; and war, 239-40, 253; Western Mediterranean, 447; Valencian, 416; Venetian, 406; West Country (England), 249 ships, 203, 239, 242, 248, 251, 308, 374, 406, 426, 468, 517; arrival of, 108, 204; blockade, 207; building, 237; cargo, 236; costs of, 238; Crown and, 106, 235-238, 241, 243-4, 248; funding for, 249; impressment, 236, 241-4; merchant, 236; naval service, 246-7; and Parliament, 241-2; paying for, 238; sold, 123, supply, 103; value of, 235; and war, 199, 236, 239, 241, 243-4 shopkeepers, 240
INDEX
shops, shopping, 464, 491, 493-501, 503-7, 508-30 Shrewsbury, 152, 155, 169, 170, 182 Shropshire, 154 Sicily, 297-8, 302-3 308; governments, 304-5; markets, 298; ports, 299; towns, 299, 301, 305, 307; wheat, 298-300, 307 Sicily, Kingdom of, 302, 306, 309 Siena, Gerard de, 41-2, 46-8 50-7 Siena, 273, 280, 286, 290, 464 Sierra Leone, 109 Sijilmassa (Tafilelt), 413, 415 silver, 95, 313, 378-9, 387, 389, 391-4, 396-7, 399-405, 407-10, 413, 415, 439, 444-6, 449, 4523, 484, 494-6, 502, 507, 509, 511, 513, 527, 533, 584; silver mining, 391-3, 387 Sisteron, 261 Slánské Hory, 453 Slovakia, 393; Central, 451, 453; copper, 438, 441, 447, 450-1, 454-7; Eastern, 453; gold, 392; ores and minerals, 440, 451, 454-5; mines and mining, 394, 438, 453; silver, 393 Sluys, 199, 200 Smale, William, 251, 253 Smith, Robert D., 187 Smolník (Szmolnokbánya, Schmöllnitz), 453-5 social, asocial, 41; barriers, 297; capital, 114; changes, 223, 571; class, 565, 582; composition, 588; consequences, 233; crises, 91; derogation, 571; dislocation, 268; divisions, 260; domination, 262; force, 260; goals, 91; groups, 165; hierarchy, 569; history and historians, 569, 571; identity, 539, 544, 566; implications, 570; intentionality, 271; interaction, 114;
641
landscape, 259-60; level, 588-9, 594; life, 211, 542-3; lineage, 570; logic, 547; meaning, 564; necessity, 45; order, 539, 559, 565, 571, 587; payments, 1134; position, 559; place, 568; privilege, 571; processes, 89, 569-570; project, 562; promotion, 565; rank, 213, 242, 570; relations, 59, 271; rewards, 565; roles, 260; science, 271; significance, 565; sphere, 66; strategies, 117; status, 259, 595; structure, 259; system, 269; tensions, 564; ties, 212; unrest, 214; variability, 165; work societal, approach, 89; autonomy, 66; order, 75, 77-8; spheres, 82 society/societies, 363, 403, 564, 593; capitalist, 571; commercial, 542; commercialized, 308; European, 80; human, 56; market, 544, 571; Northern European, 538; record, 157, 180-3; and war, 233 socioeconomic, areas, 594; category, 582; conditions, 592; groups, 582; importance, 543; levels, 597; nature, 593; status, 576, 582; strata, 587; transformation, 543 Sombart, Werner, 60-1 71, 73-4, 76 Somerset, 153 Somme River, 320, 326-7, 330, 336-7, 340-1, 343-4, 346-7 Sonnenberger Moor, 444 Sorell, Solomon, 431 Southampton, 169, 175, 181, 240, 245-6, 470; Italian imports, 470; merchants, 468; port of, 218; revenues, 218; wool, 468, 470 Southwark, 179 sovereignty, 92, 119, 140, 543
642
INDEX
Spain, 188, 407, 456; ships, 251; Sicilian wheat, 298 SŠpania Dolina, valley, 452 Spencer, 216 Spinelli, Tommaso, 465 spices, 122, 228, 405-6, 468, 496, 584, 591, 595, 595, 603; African, 97-8, 417-8; spicers, 496, 505, 514; spicing, 498, 501, 511, 526; trade, 108, 223, 2278, 230, 405-7; wines (spiced), 498, 524 Spisš (Zips), 453 Spisšská Nová Ves, 453 Spisšsko-Gemerské Rudohorie, 453 St Ives, 183 St John, Knights of, 304 St Kenelm the Martyr, 517 St Victor of Marseille, Abbey of, 258, 260 St Vällan, lake, 441 Stamford, 322, 519, 524 Stapel, 324 Staré Hory (Altgebirg), 452 Starohorské Vrchy, 451 state/states, 89, 308; city-states, 287, 467; “domain state,” 117; enterprise, 91; finances and credit, 119, 142, 143-4; Iberian, 127; late medieval, 91; Sicily, 298, 301, 309 Steenvoorde, 324 Stephan, Hans-Georg, 587 Štiavnica, Banská, 451-2; stratovolcano, 451; ore district, 452 stipulatio (Roman law contract), 49 stock exchange, German, 60, 69-70 Strasbourg, 380; grain prices, 3612 Stufford, 182 Styria, 448 Suakin, 396
Sudan, Western, 411, 416, 434 Suffolk, 246 Sugden, R., 270 Sumption, Jonathan, 189 Susen, Ayon, 426, 431-2, 437 Susen, Haim, 430-1 Sussex, 149, 153, 246 Svätodusšná, 452 SŠvedlár (Schwedler), 454 Sweden, copper, 441; firewood, 369 Switzerland, 472 Syracuse, 299, 305 Syria, 402 Tabelbala, 424 Tademaït Plateau, 421 Tafilalt, 413, 415, 423 Tagenduhet, castrum de, 424 Tagus River, 228 ibn Taghríé-Birdíé, Abué al-Maha . é sin Yuésuf, 402 Tamentit (Tamantít), 421, 423-4; Jews, 425 Tamest, 423 Tanezruft (Sahara Desert), 413, 421, 424 Tangier, defence of, 221 Taoism, 76-7 Tartary, 399 Tatra Mountains, D Š umbierské Tatry, 451; Lower (Nízké Tatry), 451 taxes and taxation, 91-2, 96, 105, 107, 112, 224, 231, 461; burden and coercion, 124, 13740, 142, 173; censal, 126, 128, 130-5, 139, 141-2; civic, 119; collection, 140, 143; comital, 265; consumption, 119, 122-3, 127, 132, 134, 142-3; customary, 216, 223; direct, 152; dízima, 223; exemptions, 221,
INDEX
243; export, 328; extraordinary, 123, 126, 129, 134-5, 138; forms of, 148; indirect, 122-3, 304; imposicions, 122-4, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134-5, 138-9; institutions, 188; Manresa, 12342; municipal, 132-42, 224, 374; ordinary, 129, 218; port towns, 253; regular, 125, 12931, 138, 228; sale of, 123-4; sales taxes, 172; sisa, 107, 2235, 227, 229, 231; tallia, 123, 130-2, 134, 139; trade, 156, 172, 306; violari, 130-3, 135 war, 233, 268-9 tax farming, 96, 106, 108-10, 113, 115, 132, 151, 154-5, 169, 173, 252, 304 Taunton, 153 Taurirt, 435 Telkibánya, 453 teloneum, 148, 170 textiles, crafts, 497; display of, 102; entrepreneurs, 321-2; Flemish, 310; industry, 310-1, 323, 334; imported, 223; magnates, 327; trades, 234, 504-6; workers, 321-2, 504-6, 588 (see also “cloth” and “clothing”) theology, moral, 41-53, 56-8 Terranova, 305, 307 Tewkesbury, 153 Thames River, 210, 246 Thomas, R., 270 Thomaz, Luís Felipe, 89, Thorn (Torux), 441 Thorold Rogers, James, 161, 164 Tichá Voda (Stillbach), 454 Tidikelt, 421 time, sale of, 48 Timmi, 423-4 tin, 244, 250, 420, 430, 438, 510 Tirol, 447
643
Tits-Dieuaide, Marie-Jeanne, 350-1 Tlemcen, 415, 434-5 Tokaj Mountains, 453 tolls, 112, 146-83; Anglo-Saxon, 149; assessing, 148, 156; collection, 146-7, 149-50, 152-3, 156, 168-9, 173-5, 177-8; collectors, 151-2, 162, 165, 167-8, 173-4, 177; customary, 148; description of, 147; documents, 147; Domesday Book, 149; disputes, 169, 173; evasion, 167; exemption/freedom from, 148-9, 16571, 244, 307; grants of, 151-2, 155, 169; impact of, 148, 165; lists of, 147, 149, 152, 156, 179; local, 148-154, 156-60, 163, 166-7, 169, 172, 175, 17983; market, 153; murage, 155; passage of goods (thurghtoll, teloneum, teoloneum, theolonium), 148; paying and payers, 146, 148, 165-7, 171-17; policy, 174; privileges, 170; public works, 149, 151-4, 156-7, 159-60, 1667, 169-72, 175-7, 181; rates, 147-8, 150, 157-66, 172-4, 177; revenue/income generated, 147, 149, 151-5, 167, 174; right to collect, 150-1, 168-9, 173; sales, 148-9; schedules, 156, 174; special, 148; structure of, 158; “toll and team,” 149; towns, 151-4; and trade, 146-8, 161, 172-8; on trade, 300, 435; transit, 149; types/forms of, 146-8, 151, 156; use of, 147, 176 Tommaso, Cecco di, and brothers, 475, 480, 483 Toreyó, Joan, 425, 431-2 Torhout, 329, 334; fairs, 330, 3323 Torres, Dolors Pifarré, 416, 419 Torksey, 158, 179 Tortosa, 123
644
INDEX
Tosinghi, Giovanni, 433-4, 437 Totnes, 500, 519, 524 Toulouse, 514 Tourelles, 191 Tournai, 189, 326, 337, 339, 341, 343-4, 346-7 towns, 350, 352, 362, 371, 375-6, 378, 402, 507, 597; bailiwick, 121; Brabant, 325; capture of, 192-3; charters, 146, 149, 1691, 224; Catalan, 120; coastal, 198, 203; councillors, 128; customary, 146; defence, 137, 193, 202, 208, 238, 243, 253; economy, 239; English, 147, 15083, 200, 233-53, 349-50, 374-5; feudal, 121; Flemish, 315, 321, 324-5; food supply, 363, 36870, 372-4; fortifications, 194; fuel, 369-73; French, 192-3; German, 361; government, 146, 173, 301, 316; gilds, 165, 172; hinterland, 165, 174; Hungary, 451, 453; Italian, 328, 374-5; jurisdiction, 319; leadership, 151; litigation, 171; Low Countries, 190, 208, 361, 375; market, 121, 153, 172; medieval, 507; mining, 453; networks, 297; Netherlands, 351; North Sea, 349-50; northern Europe, 375; patricians, 140; Picardy, 327; population, 325, 363, 3712, 374-5; port, 233-40, 243, 248, 253; Portuguese, 211, 224, 227; Provence, 262, 267; real estate, 62; records, 136, 491; resources, 132; revenues, 237-8; rights and privileges, 168-83; rivalries, 208; royal, 132-3; Sicily, 299, 301, 304-5, 307-8; taxes and tolls, 132, 151-77; townspeople, 121, 146, 193, 195, 201, 312, 370, 372; size, 363, 371-5, 377; villa, 122; walls, 151, 202, 349; Walloon, 324, 326
Trapani, 299 trade, 62, 74, 76, 146, 156, 163, 166, 172-3, 180-1, 191, 207, 221, 328-34, 349-50, 353, 362, 378, 404-6, 416, 425, 468-70, 477, 482, 484-5, 538, 548, 559, 571, 589; Asia, 101; balance of, 467, 470; Balearic copper trade, 411-57; bulk, 407; bullion, 383; carrying, 249-51; centres, 434, 447; costs of, 178, 308; conduct of, 178; control of, 208; constraints on, 308; development of, 147; commodities and goods, 150, 153, 157-9, 165, 407, 568; English, 147, 156, 166, 327; export, 407; fish, 319; flow of, 297, 305, 415; food, 174, 350, 376; foreign, 228; geography of, 161; gold, 227-8, 388, 390, 399, 406-7; in goods, 389, 405; grain, 297-300, 305-6, 353-6; Hanseatic, 450; impediments to, 161; impact on, 153; import, 407; India, 231, 101; international, 163; inter-regional, 300, 310; intra-European, 349; internal, 300, 306; Jewish, 4245; local, 163, 331; longdistance, 163, 349, 374, 446; manual, 420; maritime, 234-5, 413, 415; metal, 438; network, 389; overland, 349; overseas, 228, 230, 238, 248, 250; passenger, 249; permits, 300; private, 110; regional, 121, 308, 326; right to, 167, 171; role of, 297; royal interference, 176; “secrets,” 426; shipping, 252; silver, 391; slave, 106, 113, 118; small-scale, 163, 174; specie, 389, 399, 405; spice, 97, 107; 223, 227-8, 230, 405-7; taxation on, 156, 172, 223, 306; terms of, 275; textile, 234; tolls and, 146-8, 161, 163, 165, 168, 172; trans-Saharan, 394,
INDEX
416, 422-4, 441; unit of, 157; urban, 275, 491, 503; volume, 172, 223; wholesale, 166, 321; with West Africa, 92, 94-112, 115, 117-8, wine, 246, 327; wool, 163, 328-9, 467-8, 483 traders, 106, 172-5, 178, 378; converso, 433; foreign, 167; indigenous, 405; Jewish, 429, 433; local, 175; long-distance, 374; low-level, 495; Maghrib, 425, 427, 431-2; petty, 165, 172, 174; private, 98, 106; retail, 494, 503; river, 374; small-scale, 163, 165, 174-5; stock-market, 70; urban, 172 trades, urban, 284, 493, 589; food and drink, 493, 495-8, 500-3, 506, 511-12, 513, 515-7, 523-7, 530-2; leather and skins, 494-5, 497, 501-6, 509-11, 515, 523, 527-9, 533-4; metals, 494-6, 501, 503-6, 507, 509-13, 515, 523, 527-8; stone, 505, 509; textiles, 493, 496-500, 502, 504-5, 510, 513-16, 523-4, 533; wood, 497, 510, 514 transport/transportation, 102-103, 156, 193, 242, 246-7, 373, 539, 578; costs, 352, 362-4, 373, 375, 377-9, 468, 470; desert, 394; horses, 236, 241; improvements in, 353; inland, 374; metal, 425; mode of, 147, 163; network, 394; pilgrim, 246-9; river, 374; sea, 299; technology, 286, 375; “Transport of Flanders,” 325; troops, 235 Trave River, 572 Trento, 447 Treppenhauer, 445 Trevelyan (family), 252 Trieste, 450 Troeltsch, Ernst, 72, 72 tronage, 154 Tuareg, 434
645
Tuat, 411-3, 415-6, 421-6, 433-7, 455-6, 458 Tuat al-henna (see Zaglou), 423 Tudela, Bernat, 425, 427 Tudela, Jaume, 429 Tudor dynasty, 211 tunnage, 216-8, 220, 252 Turner, Hilary, 155 Turner, Thomas Hudson, 493 Tuscany, 54, 273, 464; agriculture, 292; merchants, 411, 419, 460; towns, 374 Tyrrhenian Basin, 389 Tyrol, 448 Ubaldi, Baldus degli, 54 Ulverston, 173 Ungheria (see Hungary), 451 Unterharz, 444 Unterinntal, 448 urban, 572; agglomerations, 597; analysis, 366-7; areas, 324, 334; artisans, 503; budgets, 153; characteristics, 310; consumers, 373; consellers, 120; centres, 299, 371, 375; charters, 170, 231; commerce, 491, 503, 506; creditors, 498, 523; crisis, 143; debt, 120; demand/needs, 297, 308, 374, 376; development, 120; dwellers/urbanites, 275, 349, 369-70, 373, 565-7; elites, 308, 576; economy, 67, 542543; “enterprise zones,” 172; finance, 124, 148, 150; gardens, 572; government, 120, 374; growth, 376, 446; households, 507; institutions, 120; legislation, 375; life, 152, 491; markets, 350, 352, 374, 595-6; masses, 301; occupations, 493 498, 504; population, 128, 363, 372; poverty, 507; rights, 454; servants, 523; tax and revenue, 120, 122-3; trade and traders,
646
INDEX
172, 491, 503; trades and crafts, 503-4, 516; types, 160; urban-rural relationship, 572, 595-6; unrest, 120 urbanization, 311, 349-50, 374 usury (usura, usurae), 41-86; Aristotle on, 41-2, 51, 56-8; “extrinsic titles” to, 57, 64, 83; Gerard of Siena on, 47-53; Giovanni d’Andrea on, 54-6; Henry of Susa on, 45; laws, 63, 64, 67, 71; prohibition of, 45, 47-50, 59-79, 81-5; restitution of, 46; Roman law definition of, 49; Thomas Aquinas on, 50; Weber, Max on, 59-86 Utrecht, 380; grain prices, 354, 356, 359-61 Valencia, 412, 427-8, 431; copper, 429, 431, 434, 437; Datini branch, 418, 429, 431, 433; intermediaries, 418; Muslim merchants, 429, 433; shipping, 416 Vallis dominorum (Herrengrund valley), 452 Valle del Fersina, 447 Valle Imperina, 447 Valois, Dukes of, 187 value, 50-3, 55-6, 284; of bills of exchange, 471-2, 474-8; capital, 277; of cargo, 406; of commodities/goods/merchandise, 156-7, 161-5, 329, 543; coinage, 484; currency, 362, 399, 402-4, 468; exchange, 313, 475, 482; of fungibles, 52, 55; of gardens, 572; of gold, 408-9; of immovables, 555; of imports, 470-1; imposicions, 124; intrinsic, 51, 313, 402-4; of land, 539, 575; market, 99, 565; of markets, 153; measure of 41; monetary, 50; of movables, 539; of sales, 163; ships, 235; silver, 95; source of, 41; 50-3, 55-6; of
tolls, 153; of trade, 112, 406; of wool, 469 values, 77, 83, 544, 565, 568 Van der Wee, Herman, 350, 351 Van Haaster, Henk, 586, 589 Var River, 263-4 Varpan, lake, 441 Vatican, 424 Vaughan, Richard, 196, 203 Vaz, Estevão, 103 Velebitski Kanal (Canale della Morlacca/della Montagna), 450 Veneto, 447 Venice, 120, 134-5, 142, 144-5, 404, 407, 411-2, 416, 439, 464, 472, 475-6; and Aragon, 428; banking, 475; bills of exchange, 476; Borromei, 460, 464, 471, 475-6, 480, 481-3, 485; companies, 464; copper, 411, 416, 419-21, 424, 426-8, 430, 433, 438, 440, 447-50, 454-7; currency, 401; exchange rates, 473-4; exports, 400, 406; firms and agents, 419, 424; galleys, 416, 427-9, 431, 469, 472; gold-silver ratio, 398, 400, 406, 407; lagoon, 450; merchants, 392, 424, 427, 475; money market, 471; shipping, 426, 433; textiles, 469; tin, 420; trade, 406 Ventura & Co., 475 Veporské Pásmo, 451 Veporské Vrchy, 451 Verdon River, 264 Verzona (galley), 428 Veurne, 325, 337, 339, 341, 344, 346-7; castellany of, 316, 319, 324, 337, 339, 341-5, 347 Vienna, 450 Vienne, Council of (1311-1312), 56 Villadestes, Mecià de, 424 Visby, 441
INDEX
Visconti, Dukes of Milan, 461, 465 Viseu, Duchy of, 221, 228 Vismara, Taddeo di Ardizio, 388 Vitaliani (family), Gerolimo, 462; Giacomo, 462 Von Thünen, Johan, 363-9, 376 Volovské Vrchy (Volovec, Ochsenberg), 453 Volterra, 464 Waitz, Georg, 492, 517 Wakenitz River, 573, 583 Walaéta, 413, 423 Walchen Valley, 448 Wales, 235-6, 246, 468 Warendorp, Wilhelm von, 587 Wargla, 387, 415 wars and warfare, 91, 119; Aragon-Castile, 124, 128, 136; Aragon-Genoa, 135, 136; Aragon-Genoa-Venice, 142; Aragon-Sicily, 300; benefits, 239; civil, 124, 136, 144, 214, 483; domestic, 259; expenditures, 91; England-Scotland, 239; fifteenth-century, 188; financing and taxation, 119, 128, 135, 187, 189, 190, 191, 233, 268-9, 436; Flanders, 310; Genoa-Venice (War of Chioggia), 144; Hundred Years War, 187-8, 190-1, 195-6, 198, 209, 233-5, 239, 240, 245, 249, 2534; Iberia, 136; impact, 119, 142, 161, 233-5, 237, 238, 253, 351, 428; material and supplies, 199, 236, 237; medieval, 187; Portugal-Castile, 220, 223, 428; shipping, 236, 237, 239, 241-2, 244-7, 249; sieges, 195, 208; Wars of the Roses, 216, 220 Warwick, Earl of, 216 Warwick, estates, 216, 218 Waterford, 182
647
Waurin, Jean de, 195, 196, 200 wealth, 91-92, 227-8, 248, 464-5, 535, 542, 553, 555, 559, 561, 565; as capital, 564; circulation of, 562, 571; immovable, 538-9; king’s, 215; metropolitan, 221; movable, 538-9, 56; nature of, 564; patrimonial, 555; per capita, 126; private, 215; public, 215; “real,” 543 Weber, Max, 59-84; dissertation, 60, 61, 67; Economy and Society, 61, 73, 75 77; History of Commercial Partnerships, 61; Protestant Ethic, 60, 67-8, 70-1, 73-5, 79; non-Christian religions, 767; “spirit of capitalism,” 67-8 71; usury, 60-1, 67, 72-3, 75-84 Weinberger, Stephen, 260 Welf, 444 Wennington, Robert, 252 West Country, 249, 252, 254 Westminster, 177, 240; Abbey, 492, 517 Wettinger, Godfrey, 303 Weymouth, 246 William the Conqueror, King of England, 188 Wilson, Alan G., 365 Winchelsea, 246 Winchester, 180, 183, 517 wine, 49, 51, 119, 121-3, 127, 137, 158-60 162, 165, 223, 238, 245-51, 277, 281, 327, 495, 498, 501-5, 511, 524, 530-2 Winter, S. G., 272 Wissenbach, 442 Wisla River (Vistula), 441 Wobes, Timo, 587 Wolkenburg, 446 Wolof, 108 wool, buying of, 322, 328-9, 46770, 478; cloth and clothing, 477, 496-7, 500, 507, 510-1,
648
INDEX
513, 516; draper, 502, 507, 513-5; England, 147, 158-66, 175, 327, 329, 467-70, 478; exports, 328-9, 469, 477, 481; imports, 69; Italian buyers and sellers, 328-9, 467-70; Maghribi, 417; market, 163; price of, 161; merchants, 175; revenue from, 127, 147, 158-63, 175, 328; sale of, 165-6, 416; shipping of, 175, 328; Staplers, 477; trade in, 163, 328-9, 4678, 470, 483; workers, 498, 506, 516; value of, 164, 469; yield, 163-4 Worcester, 168, 182 Wright, Thomas, 508 Wyffels, Carlos, 311 Xipio, Jucef, 429 Yarmouth, 159, 239, 246 Yaxley, 179 Yemen, 387, 402 York, 171, 182; crown estates, 218 York, Duke of, 215 Yorkshire, 246 Ypres, 188, 208, 310, 313, 315-6, 319, 322, 324, 327-9, 333, 3369, 341-2, 344-5, 347; capital and credit, 320, 322 324, 327, 329, 331-4, 336; castellany, 321, 324, 332, 337, 339, 341, 342, 344-5, 347; central place, 312, 321-2, 325-6, 330-1, 3334; citizens, 319, 325, fairs, 314, 329, 330-3, 339-40, 342-8; government, 312-3, 316, 319, 322, 328; industry, 311, 316, 321, 327, 329; legal system, 324 merchants, 322, 327, 329; port, 319; residents, 321, 322; rebellions, 322; suburbs and satellites, 321, 324; troops, 205, 206 Zaglou, 423
Zagreb, 450 Západné Karpaty, 451 Zeeland, 207 zentner (unit of weight), 392, 454-5 Zerner, Monique, 257, 260-1, 264, 266 zinc, 420, 439, 448, 453 Zschopau Valley, 445 Zwickauer Mulde, 446 Zwin River, 208
