Jim Bolton's new book is a welcome addition to the literature of medieval economic history. Over the past two decades, there has been a substantial increase in scholarly output by numismatists and monetary historians, but much of it has been narrowly focused and published in specialized and sometimes inaccessible venues. Given the move by economic historians away from models of population and resources toward models of commerce and distribution, the value of enhanced knowledge of money and its use is self-evident. Bolton provides a masterly guide to recent literature and a compelling rationale for situating monetary history more centrally in the literature of commercialization and economic history as a whole.
The book is divided into four sections, one thematic and three chronological. The thematic section explains some of the basic conceptual tools commonly employed by monetary historians, such as the Fisher equation and the creative ways it can be manipulated to supplement deficient empirical data. Bolton also summarizes the various definitions of money crafted by modern economists and provides an account of the basic institutional parameters within which money operated. Rounding out the thematic section is a helpful summary of how money was produced and circulated in medieval England, including succinct accounts of the coins in common use, minting practices, bullion flows, and estimates of the money supply. Specialists may not find much new in this section, but general readers will certainly find the overview helpful when they turn to the core chronological sections of the book.
Each of the chronological sections is made up of a pair of chapters, one devoted primarily to changes in the money supply and the other to considering how the changes interacted with concurrent economic factors to effect change. Bolton's chronological divisions are fairly conventional, comprising an early period when money was clearly in use but not widely distributed, a middle period when bullion supplies increased dramatically and the use of money became pervasive in society, and a late period when bullion supplies plunged and society was forced to adjust to a great dearth of circulating coinage. Each period is defined by several characteristic traits, but the key distinguishing feature is the amount of silver (and eventually gold) available to facilitate the production of coins.
Bolton's first chronological period extends from the tenth century to 1158. Hard data about the money supply is scarce for the period, and historical opinion has been sharply divided about levels of wealth and economic sophistication. Some historians have emphasized the kingdom's ability to generate high geld payments and portrayed Anglo-Saxon England as an exceptionally wealthy kingdom with an effective monetary system. Bolton aligns himself more closely with the skeptics, arguing that while the period made institutional contributions to the development of monetary standards that would influence subsequent periods, its commercial development was still rudimentary and its wealth was socially circumscribed. He suggests that the period had a monetized economy, with money being common enough to serve as a standard of value, but not a true money economy, with most parts of society making regular and recurring use of money for routine transactions. There simply was not a large enough volume of circulating silver in the period for coins to be in common use at the level of the small landholder.
The situation changed significantly in the middle of the twelfth century, thanks largely to an influx of silver from new mines brought into production in Europe, first in Saxony and then in central Europe. Bolton sees this period as witnessing the true emergence of a money economy with a circulating medium substantial enough to permeate all ranks of society. He provides an excellent overview of changing mint outputs and the striking growth in the use of money that characterized the “long” thirteenth century. This is also the period that has come in for extended analysis by advocates of the new commercial history, and as Bolton points out, the two phenomena are obviously closely related. Refreshingly, though, Bolton does not suppose that mint outputs alone can stand as a surrogate for all other economic activity, and he readily concedes that money's growing role was as much a consequence as a cause of other economic developments, such as population growth and institutional change.
Bolton's final period, from the middle of the fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century, witnessed a dramatic about-face, as European mines fell out of production and replacement sources failed to materialize. The period has traditionally been viewed as witnessing both a bullion famine and an unending series of tribulations, economic and other. On the whole, Bolton is more optimistic about the period than many other historians, particularly monetary historians. He recognizes that the collapse of the silver supply served as a major impediment to prosperity, but he suggests that the situation was not entirely gloomy. From a strictly monetary point of view, he argues that the addition of gold to the money supply alleviated some of the problems associated with declining silver, and he also believes that the increasing use of transferrable paper obligations compensated to some extent for the drop in circulating coinage.
While the basic framework is fairly conventional, the main attraction of Bolton's book is the compelling way he relates monetary changes to other developments. His treatment of changing standards of numeracy, for example, is cleverly linked to better-known arguments about changes in literacy associated with the work of Michael Clanchy and others. He also provides first-rate accounts of the adoption of direct production by great estate holders in the later twelfth century, the legal enforcement of debts, and the impact of taxation at various points in time, among other things. The book manages to be both accessible and scholarly, and provides an excellent guide to anyone wishing to know more about the medieval English economy.
