If English early modernists have recently challenged the view that rural credit was oppressive before the nineteenth century, their medieval counterparts, it seems, remain more or less tied to an older view of such credit as ‘a relatively intermittent feature of the rural economy which, in so far as it had any lasting impact, served largely to exacerbate pre-existing economic difficulties’ (pp. 7–8). It is in order to test this view that Briggs took the debt litigation of five different court rolls, providing evidence on seven manorial villages, from the late thirteenth to the end of the fourteenth century. The villages, lying in the counties of Cambridgeshire and Buckinghamshire, are Balsam, Littleport, Willingham, Oakington, Great Horwood, Cottenham and Dry Drayton. He makes no attempt to claim them as representative of English villages more broadly. The ‘midland’ manors in his study were all in the hands of ecclesiastical landlords and were dominated by large customary tenancies, often large enough to require additional labour. The study, as Briggs notes, is therefore ‘most revealing about the credit activities of relatively wealthy villeins in possession of holdings measuring 10 acres or more’ (p. 24).
Briggs’ findings are instructive. Although cash loans did exist, in contrast to the situation in contemporary Europe where they were as common or more common than credit sales, such loans were relatively infrequent in medieval England, where deferred payments for goods and livestock were the most common form of credit, with delayed remuneration for work or other services next in line. There is also some evidence of the use of the ‘purchase price advance’, in which the debtor agreed to supply goods to the creditor at a time in the future in exchange for a cash payment (p. 38). Nor did land constitute the usual form of security; personal securities as the preferred form of pledge enjoyed a much higher profile than either land or written instruments. Most credit was between villagers, and not from institutions, lords, or even the beneficed clergy, and few creditors were non-resident. More significantly, there is little evidence for the emergence of the serial creditor or debtor. Certainly, those involved in the credit market did not belong to the ranks of the poor; the lending tended to be horizontal among villagers in relatively wealthy positions. That the credit supply contracted in dearth years is clearly indicated, although some villagers fared better than others, suggesting that the market for credit was localised, dependent upon mortality and highly segmented.
Briggs must be congratulated for this carefully argued and painstakingly researched monograph. His deft and thorough questioning of his source material reveals in full the problematic nature of his data and, as a result, the tentative nature of his conclusions, but it also reminds us how wonderfully imaginative medieval historians can be. His argument that credit in the medieval English village may not have been as oppressive as current historiography suggests is clearly influenced by the geography of his sources, but it does allow for the possibility that credit may have been as much about investment as exigency in fourteenth-century England.
