Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 2 (2009), p. 275

This, the first detailed study of rural credit in fourteenth-century England, is an important book. Through an investigation of inter-peasant pleas of debt in manorial courts Chris Briggs makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of medieval rural, as opposed to mercantile, credit. Briggs, an established authority on the subject, presents a cohesive analysis based on the evidence drawn from seven detailed case studies which are located firmly within the wider context of our understanding of European and early modern credit. Throughout the book he is at pains to give careful consideration to the limitations of the investigation and its evidence.

Briggs presents a data-rich study in which he argues in support of the ‘new view’ of credit with its stress on the ubiquity and sophistication of rural credit mechanisms and their positive effect on traditional economies, although he does not discuss the role of rural credit in the economy generally. This forms part of the bottom-up perspective of the Middle Ages in which peasants are depicted as proactive and innovative in meeting the economic challenges they faced. Briggs argues against the pessimistic view, often associated with the work of M.M.Postan, of the impoverishing and exploitative nature of medieval rural credit. He finds many similarities in his evidence with the conclusions drawn by recent European scholars and argues against the view of credit as a marker of poverty and crisis.

The book is constructed around a series of questions about rural credit: who was involved as creditors and debtors; how and why did the debts come about; the changing availability of credit; the times and conditions of the transactions; the role of credit within social relationships. These are placed within broader concerns about the consequences of debt and credit for rural society, especially the creation and perpetration of social inequalities. The evidence is drawn from six village case studies located in Cambridgeshire and that of Great Horwood in Buckinghamshire. Briggs argues that together they are representative of ‘Midland’ characteristics of landholding and tenurial arrangements. He has developed an innovative and effective methodological approach to the thousands of debt plaints found in the manor court rolls and constructs many hundred personal biographies of the peasant participants. Throughout the book Briggs draws out nuanced local and chronological distinctions within the data which are presented in a wealth of graphs and tables.

The efficiency of the institutional context of the manor and its court for these transactions forms a central plank to Briggs’ arguments. He argues that medieval rural credit grew out of the highly personalized nature of local society, the continuity of long established social relationships and the manorial system of personal sureties or pledges which were employed to protect the lender against default. The manor court provided the debt recovery machinery and was used to enforce the claim and, if necessary, to seize the debtor’s goods. He argues that the court provided an effective method of enforcing repayment, justice was rapid and the duration of the loans was short. Credit relations were essentially oral, as opposed to written. Contracts such as these fell within the jurisdiction of the manorial court which was very different to the notary system in Europe.

This book outlines for us many detailed features of rural credit. The most common form of credit was the giving or receiving of a commodity (sale) or the performance of a task or service for another person on the basis that payment would be made later. Loans of money did not form a prominent feature of the evidence, in contrast to the situation in Europe. Nevertheless, a debt was normally claimed in the litigation as a sum of money. Briggs discovered that rural creditors and debtors were usually male heads of households who held land, but sometimes servants were observed in pursuit of arrears of wages. Credit-debt relationships were horizontal, individuals could be both creditors and debtors, and entwined with virtually everyone else in their community, although the landless were noticeably absent from the data. Briggs was unable to identify any individuals living purely from lending. From a study of the landholdings of the litigants he argues that it was the possession of land and the ability to sub-let it which made individual borrowers credit worthy.

Another important contribution of this study is the examination of the supply of credit during periods of dearth, crisis mortality and variations in the money supply both before and after the Black Death. Briggs argues that the fast and efficient debt recovery mechanisms provided by the manor court encouraged lending when conditions were otherwise unpropitious and bestowed advantages on credit markets in the English countryside that were not shared with other regions of rural Europe. Despite local differences he is able to conclude that English rural credit was a success and, apart from the exceptional years of the Great Famine, differed from mercantile credit in its ability to withstand these adverse conditions.