El sistema financiero a finales de la Edad Media: instrumentos y métodos. AAVV

Чтение книги онлайн.

      CREDIT AGREEMENTS AND LITIGATION OVER DEBT IN ENGLISH MANORIAL COURTS

      Phillipp R. Schofield Aberystwyth University

Work on rural credit, especially credit agreements involving members of the peasantry, has grown significantly in the last two decades. Earlier work by Elaine Clark on the fifteenth-century small town of Writtle (Essex) offered a pioneering examination of credit arrangements and the ways in which these intersected. She also offered some careful and important commentary on the form of agreement, which included money loans and sale credits¹. Work on rural credit in the last two decades has chiefly been undertaken by the present author and by Chris Briggs and in a number of publications, including Briggs, major monograph on the topic of rural credit and indebtedness, they have aimed to set out the variety of ways in which credit can be examined for rural England during this period.² This has resulted in discussion of the form and nature of credit arrangements and some identification of distinctions between the kinds of credit extended, the likely differences in terms of credit agreements over time, as well as discussion of the nature of credit agreement.

      87

As regards the last point, there is some obvious distinction to be drawn between the historical view of credit arrangements as essentially the product of horizontal agreements, conducted typically between parties of generally similar means and without the operation of significantly unequal power relations and, conversely, credit agreements that were created in essentially vertical relationships in which one party, typically the creditor, enjoys a considerably enhanced bargaining position relative to the other party. Briggs, in particular, has sought to show that much credit extended in the medieval English countryside was not the product of distress or unequal bargaining positions, occasioned perhaps by crisis events such as harvest failure or famine; instead, as he has argued, credit agreements were often the product of fairly small-scale exchange between parties dealing in proximity and often in forms of mutual support aimed at facilitating consumption.³ The present author, who has tended to work on credit and indebtedness in the decades either side of 1300, has also, as Briggs has noted, often represented credit in terms of distress and has associated it, on occasion and typically indirectly, with other indices of apparent upheaval in crisis years, including heightened land market activity.⁴ In recent work, the present author has attempted to show that a considerable amount of the credit recovered in the early fourteenth century had been extended in large sums and often extended over what were seemingly quite long periods of time. In particular, there is plentiful evidence for the involvement of relatively wealthy merchants and townsmen engaging, often as creditors, with peasant debtors, and often in credit agreements involving very large sums of money and/or large amounts of goods, especially grain.⁵

      In this paper, further reflection will be made upon the role of external agents in developing modes of business dealing in the medieval English village. Before we return to this theme however we will need to set out a more general context. In what follows therefore we will begin with a discussion of credit agreements, their form and evidence for them in the medieval English countryside, especially at the level of the peasantry. We will then discuss evidence for the role of external agents, both as lawyers and attorneys as well as merchants and townsmen in the medieval English village, and consider the likely significance of their role in helping establish modes of dealing and of conducting business at the local level.

      CREDIT AGREEMENTS: EVIDENCE AND FORM

Most of the evidence for peasant-level debt in medieval England comes from litigation and, in particular, litigation recorded in manorial courts. We have very little, though certainly some, evidence from the point that credit is extended but we do have a great deal of information arising from the point of recovery and, given that, recovery recorded as part of the process of debt litigation. While some of that material resides in fora other than manorial courts, including central courts, borough courts and other ancillary documentation, such as wills, the bulk of evidence and, to date, the greater part of historical investigation is focussed upon manorial courts. Manorial courts in England survive in great number from the second half of the thirteenth century and have been used extensively by historians of the medieval English countryside and in particular of the peasantry since the end of the nineteenth century.⁶ Some of the earliest work on manorial courts and the evidence they offered was undertaken by legal historians and, in particular, F. W. Maitland whose seminally important study of the customary law in manorial courts has remained a standard point of reference for more than a century.⁷ СКАЧАТЬ