Trade, Money, and Power in Medieval England

Pamela Nightingale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780754659419
• eBook ISBN: 9781000949902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The sixteen articles in this collection analyse the contribution made by overseas trade, and the wealth in coin which it created, to the development of the English economy and locate this in an European-wide setting. In time, they range from the late Anglo-Saxon period up to the advent of the Tudors. The papers include general surveys of the importance of coinage and credit in the rise and decline of a market economy, and of the way that credit functioned in a society that lacked reliable supplies of bullion and which was also subject to the scourges of warfare and devastating disease. They illustrate, too, how from the tenth century the English crown used its control and exploitation of the coinage as part of a sophisticated fiscal system which helped create the precocious power of the English state. The author further shows how the wool trade altered the geographical pattern of wealth and enriched peasants, landowners and merchants, while the competing interests involved in the trade also cause political conflicts in Parliament and in the government of London during the period when London was establishing itself as the political capital and the financial centre of the kingdom.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• I Communication through capital and trade: money and the rise of a market economy in medieval Europe
• II The ora, the mark, and the mancus: weight-standards and the coinage in eleventh-century England (part 1)
• III The ora, the mark, and the mancus: weight-standards and the coinage in eleventh-century England (part 2)
• IV The evolution of weight-standards and the creation of new monetary and commercial links in northern Europe from the tenth century to the twelfth century
• V Some London moneyers and reflections on the organization of English mints in the eleventh and twelfth centuries
• VI The origin of the Court of Husting and Danish influence on London's development into a capital city
• VII ‘The king’s proht’: trends in Lnghsh mint and monetary policy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries
• VIII The London pepperers' guild and some twelfth-century English trading links with Spain
• IX The lay subsidies and the distribution of wealth in medieval England, 1275–1334
• X Norwich, London, and the regional integration of Norfolk's economy in the first halfofthe fourteenth century
• XI The English parochial clergy as investors and creditors in the first half of the fourteenth century
• XII Knights and merchants: trade, politics, and the gentry in late medieval England
• XIII The growth of London in the medieval English economy
• XIV Capitalists, crafts, and constitutional change in late fourteenth-century London
• XV Money and credit in the economy of late medieval England
• XVI Monetary contraction and mercantile credit in later medieval England
• XVII England and the European depression of the mid-fifteenth century 631–656 The Journal of European Economic History 26. Rome, 1997
• Index