Trade and credit in later medieval England

This study uses the, virtually complete, series of Statute Staple certificates (TNA C241 and C152) to explore the relationship between credit and trade in the later medieval economy. The Staple system was generally used as a secure method of financing trade in the later middle ages. Statute Staple certificates were sent to Chancery to instruct local sheriffs to arrest the creditor and impound his goods in an attempt to recover the debt. The system remained in place and unaltered between 1353 and 1532. The project will contrast these Staple debts with the debt recovery process, usually for lower-value transactions, used in provincial borough courts. This will be the first work that investigates the links between these two systems. Whilst historians have discussed the Staple system in terms of royal wool and cloth taxation, its function in the debt recovery process has never been investigated before.
Later medieval English trade was dominated by the use of credit. The project will analyse the step-by-step process of debt recovery for its mercantile users from the initial enrolment of a recognisance registering a credit agreement in a Staple court to the process by which the courts attempted to recover the money from defaulting borrowers. The monograph will also study the merchants who used the credit system in the sometimes demanding and gruelling commercial conditions of the later middle ages. In doing so it considers the role of human expectations and psychological factors in economic change. The later middle ages was a period of climatic change, high mortality, endemic warfare, economic recession and bullion famines. The severe, mid-fifteenth century economic recession has been described as the 'great slump' which lasted a quarter of a century. These were merchants like the Norwich merchant, William Butt, who, with his son and nephew, were extended £200 credit by the wool merchant and financier, William de la Pole, whilst he was on business in Norwich in 1351 or the less fortunate Bristol merchant, Robert Sturmy, whose ships were attacked and cargoes stolen by Genoese pirates off Malta in 1458. The project also examines the manufacturers and middlemen who traded within the domestic market, such as the draper, John Wybram, who was owed just 1s for a pair of trousers.
It examines the Statute Staple debt evidence over the whole period from a national perspective seeking to understand the long term trends in the English credit market. It discusses the cyclical peaks and troughs of the medieval credit market, each roughly 60 years in duration, which resemble modern 'Long Wave' business cycles. The debt evidence will be compared to the data on imports and exports recorded in the enrolled customs accounts. It investigates the thesis that the availability of credit had a direct influence upon fluctuations in overseas trade.
The study will examine geographical or regional shifts in the availability and use of credit by examining the debt profiles of Staple towns analysed by region. This data will be juxtaposed with the customs evidence from each region's principal ports in order to establish a relationship between patterns in the credit market and levels of overseas trade at a local level. These important geographical divergences in reactions to recession are evaluated in terms of a restructuring of English trade in the fifteenth century that focused on London.
London's commercial primacy is investigated with reference to the Statute Staple certificates enrolled at Westminster and London in the period. The reduction of provincial debt pleas seems to have been counterbalanced by the dramatic increase in debt litigation in Westminster's courts, particularly where, by the fifteenth century, London merchants increasingly sued debtors from provincial towns. One of the key aims of the project is to assess the evidence for the increased concentration of finacial services in the capital in the fifteenth century.

One of the main features of this project is to increase public knowledge and awareness of the relationship between the availability of credit and booms and slumps in pre-industrial trade. Non-academic beneficiaries could include members of the general public with interests in medieval economic and social history, the workings of the pre-industrial economy, medieval trade and the merchants who plied it and, more generally, the history of later medieval England. It is envisaged that beneficiaries will also include those with specific interests in credit and credit crises of the past. These might include non-specialists with a general interest as well as those within the financial services industry either as practitioners or as policy makers. Whilst not directly comparable to modern, industrialised economies, the changing patterns of the availability and use of credit in the later medieval market economy, particularly in the economic recession of the mid-fifteenth century, might easily be described as 'the credit crunch of the fifteenth century'. Further the restructuring of trade and the importance of London as a commercial centre in this period at the expense of provincial trading centres might also stimulate the interest of the general public with its articulation in terms of a 'North-South divide'. Awareness of past relationships between credit and the economy will allow individuals to pose questions about, and contextualise, more recent economic crises. The on-line accessibility of the Statute Staple debt certificates (TNA C241) translated into English used in this research will allow for greater public engagement with the themes and issues discussed in the monograph.

The intention is to disseminate some of the findings of this research to a wider, non-academic audience via public lectures, under the aegis of Nottingham University's Institute of Medieval Research with the titles: 'the credit crunch of the fifteenth century' and 'commercialism and prosperity in the later middle ages: a North-South divide'.

Furthermore, as part of the School of History's commitment to public history, the intention is to publish two 1,500-word, web-based articles to accompany the above public lectures, and using similar titles, via the School of History's web pages. The articles would be directly linked to a web-based, public access, discussion forum that would allow members of the public to engage with the issues, and express their own views and interpretations of them.