Credit and the rural economy in North-western Europe, c. 1200-c.1850

202 Pages·2009·1.229 MB·English

by  Phillipp R. Schofield, Gérard Béaur, Thijs Lambrecht

Food production and food processing in western Europe
CORN Publication Series 12
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© 2009 Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
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ISBN 978-2-503-51984-5
D/2009/0095/141
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Credit and the rural economy in
North-western Europe, c.1200–c.1850
Edited by Phillipp R. Schofi eld
and Thijs Lambrecht
H
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CONTENTS
List of contributors vi
1. Introduction. Credit and the rural economy in North-western
Europe, c.1200–c.1800
Phillipp R. SCHOFIELD and Thijs LAMBRECHT 1
2. Credit in rural Flanders, c.1250-c.1600: its variety and signifi cance
Erik THOEN and Tim SOENS 19
3. Village-indebtedness in Holland in the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries
Jaco ZUIJDERDUIJN 39
4. Credit, the land market and the connection between the rural and urban
economy. The use of perpetual annuities in Aartselaar (Brabant)
from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century
Michael LIMBERGER 63
5. Rural credit and the market for annuities in eighteenth-century Flanders
Thijs LAMBRECHT 75
6. Credit and agriculture in the Netherlands,
eighteenth-nineteenth centuries
Piet VAN CRUYNINGEN 99
7. Credit and the freehold land market in England, c.1200–c.1350:
possibilities and problems for research
Chris BRIGGS 109
8. Peasants and contract in the thirteenth century: village elites
and the land market in eastern England
Phillipp R. SCHOFIELD 129
9. Credit and land in eighteenth-century France
Gérard BÉAUR 153
10. Urban capital and agrarian reforms: rural credit markets in
nineteenth-century Westphalia
Christine FERTIG 169
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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
GERARD BÉAUR Centre de Recherches Historiques,
CNRS/EHESS, Paris
CHRIS BRIGGS University of Southampton
CHRISTINE FERTIG University of Münster
THIJS LAMBRECHT Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO)
Ghent University
MICHAEL LIMBERGER Department of Early Modern History
Ghent University
PHILLIPP R. SCHOFIELD Department of History and Welsh History,
Aberystwyth University
TIM SOENS University of Antwerp
ERIK THOEN Department of Medieval History,
Ghent University
PIET VAN CRUYNINGEN Wageningen University
JACO ZUIJDERDUIJN Utrecht University
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1 Introduction.
Credit and the rural economy in North-western
Europe, c.1200–c.1850
Phillipp SCHOFIELD, Aberystwyth University
Thijs LAMBRECHT, Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO)
The papers gathered in this volume arise from a conference held at the University of
Ghent in spring 2003, on ‘Credit and the rural economy in Europe, c.1100–c.1800’. As
part of an ongoing examination of credit and its provision in European past societies,
the present papers offer further insight into the ways in which credit was provided and
managed, as well as the opportunities which credit may or may not have presented in
effecting economic and social change in medieval and early modern society. In these
respects, the papers in this volume add to a developing investigation of the history of
credit and of indebtedness in northern Europe, which also coincides with a continued
interest in the structures of credit evident in studies of southern European societies.
The present volume also, for a broad North Sea region, develops a concentration
upon the economic and social history of credit, more than it does a cultural history
of credit, the latter a theme which has emerged with some force in writing about, for
example, credit in early modern Europe, in, for instance, discussion of reputation and
social standing (for instance, Fontaine, 1994: 1390–1; Muldrew, 1998). Instead, the
themes here are deliberately focussed on the nature of credit, its form and structure,
as well as upon the economic and social impact of credit and the changing availability
of the same.
Although an earlier historiography on the economic and social development of rural
Europe between the middle ages and the nineteenth century contains important reference
to the role and nature of credit, it was not until the early 1990s that credit and the rural
economy were studied more systematically and from a variety of angles. The breakthrough
of rural credit as a main theme in rural historiography can be observed through the large
number of conferences and publications during the past twenty years. The special issue
of the Annales on credit networks in early modern Europe in 1994 undoubtedly marked
the start of a period of intense research on credit and rural society. In 1995 peasant
indebtedness and rural credit was the main theme of the annual Flaran conference of
rural historians (Berthe, 1998). A conference in 1996 highlighted the enormous variety
of credit instruments and practices in early modern and modern Europe (Fontaine, Postel-
Vinay, Rosenthal and Servais, 1997). This renewed interest in credit also revived and
stimulated research on the complex relationship between money and credit. Both the
debts and the money of French peasants were at the centre of attention in 2000 (Minard
and Woronoff, 2003). In that same year credit practices and institutions with particular
reference to medieval England were discussed at a conference in Oxford (Schofi eld and
Mayhew, 2002). Finally, also in conferences dealing with broader themes such as the
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Credit and the rural economy in North-western Europe, c.1200–c.1850
land market or commercial exchange, credit was included in the research programme
(Cavaciocchi, 2001 and 2005).
The track record on research into rural credit after two decades of intense research
is impressive. Perhaps even more than in the vast number of books and articles, this is
best expressed in the main characteristics of this research. Reviewing the research on
credit in the last 20 years reveals three main characteristics setting it somewhat aside
from other research themes that have dominated rural history. Firstly, credit has been
studied from a broad time period extending from the early Middle Ages to the end of the
nineteenth century. Credit has attracted the attention of medievalists, early modernists
and modern historians, a development which can be viewed as a reasonably rare achieve-
ment. A second notable feature of this research strand is the broad geographical span.
In the last years knowledge about credit practices in the countryside has advanced fairly
evenly across the whole of Europe. Lastly, the study of rural credit has benefi tted from
the input of researchers with various spheres of interests and methods. Whilst the older
research on credit had a dominantly monetary and legal approach, the subject was now
also treated by researchers adopting a more social, cultural and econometric approach to
rural credit. Rural credit has been the research theme par excellence that has gone beyond
the traditional chronological, geographical and disciplinary boundaries. Recent attempts
to present a general overview of credit in Europe draw heavily on this research on rural
credit (see for example Fontaine, 2008).
I. The relation of credit to economic change in the countryside
Historians have come increasingly to associate credit with economic change at all
levels of the rural economy. As Briggs notes in his contribution to this volume, it has now
become all but impossible to consider quasi-commercial activity in the countryside (and
here he is discussing the land market) without including discussion of the availability of
credit (Briggs, this volume: 109-110). There is of course a long-standing historiographi-
cal association between credit and the economy in past society, with credit, depending
upon its role, seen either as spur to economic activity, freeing up the use of money, or as
an equivalent to money itself. Thus, historians of medieval and early modern trade and
fi nance have longed recognised the role of credit within the economy (Postan, 1973a
and b). A more recent historical study of credit has brought a greater emphasis to inves-
tigation of the credit economy in past society within rural economies and at social and
economic levels below those of the leading fi gures of the countryside, especially secular
and ecclesiastical lords. This is not to say that it is only in recent years that historians
have been at all aware of credit within local rural society. The work of R.H. Tawney, for
instance, in the fi rst years of the twentieth century made quite clear his awareness of the
signifi cant role which credit could play in rural society, and at the level of the peasantry
(Tawney, 1912; Wilson, 1925). Half a century later, Holderness, using probate inventories
from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, also unveiled a rural economy in which
credit was present at all levels (Holderness, 1976). Research in the last twenty or so
years has not only tended to resurrect some of the earlier emphases, but most strikingly,
has also attempted to employ them anew in further empirical research. Thus, perhaps
most o bviously, for early modern France, for instance, Postel-Vinay has explored the
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Introduction
close relationship between credit and agricultural investment, both in his own study of
the impact of credit in a number of different regional contexts, and also in his work with
Hoffman and Rosenthal upon credit and its impact upon the modern French economy
(Postel-Vinay, 1998; Hoffman, Postel-Vinay and Rosenthal, 2000). Muldrew has also
examined, in considerable detail, the nature and structure of credit in early modern Eng-
land, providing both a close analysis of the availability of low-level credit arrangements
and an assessment of their social and cultural importance (Muldrew, 1998). Striking in
Muldrew’s assessment is the apparent ubiquity of credit in later sixteenth-century England,
a point also made by Béaur for France in the eighteenth century and one to which he
returns in his chapter for this volume (Muldrew, 1998; Béaur, this volume: 153-154; also,
for instance, Spufford, 1994: 1362–3). A further point arising from Muldrew’s analysis
is that the availability of credit is also identifi ed as directly associated with dispute over
credit arrangements. There is not, to follow Muldrew, a positive correlation between a
failing economy and an increase in litigation over failed credit agreements. Instead, it is
the frequency of credit arrangements and the disputes that they generate, especially in
years of relative plenty, which is most evident. This may of course suggest that, despite
the extremely widespread employment of credit, those most at risk from market failures
and fl uctuating prices were still to a degree isolated from credit markets and established
mechanisms for recovery. That said, Muldrew’s assessment of a generally available credit
for the early modern period stands in some contrast to that observed in certain contexts
for the Middle Ages, at least especially in England. For that earlier period, it has been
assumed, at least by some of those investigating rural credit, that the availability of credit
fl uctuated with some frequency and was, in no small part, either extended or withdrawn
at moments consistent with economic change, the latter determined by a variety of exog-
enous and endogenous shifts (Schofi eld, 1997, 2008). Thus, as we shall consider further
below, periods of harvest failure and general shortage may have witnessed a withdrawal
of credit, evidence of a relatively precarious market and one that may have stood in some
contrast to the kinds of markets where credit was generally available in the early modern
period, at least as described by Muldrew.1
The extent to which credit contributed to the growth of the rural economy has been
subject to various and quite divergent interpretations. The most infl uential model of
pre-industrial economic development in rural Europe suggested that the debts found
among the peasantries were symptomatic of their inability to escape the Malthusian trap.
Peasant indebtedness – debts owed by peasants – were viewed as intricately linked with
their economic vulnerability. The French model of a subsistence crisis – whereby rising
food prices resulted in increased mortality and fewer marriages – also had a fi nancial
expression in rising levels of peasant borrowing. During these crisis moments peasant
households had to borrow simply to survive. As these debts accumulated they were
forced to mortgage their land and eventually lost it to their creditors. In other words, the
money owed by rural households was seen as a symptom of structural poverty. Credit,
in all its forms, paved the way for expropriation of the rural classes (for this view see
1 For a recent and slightly different assessment, including one which proposes some durability of
credit supply in the fourteenth century allied to intensely local variety in terms of the availability
of credit, see Briggs, 2009: 210–13.
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Credit and the rural economy in North-western Europe, c.1200–c.1850
for example Goubert, 1965). Others have claimed that increased levels of debt among
peasants should be viewed as indirect indicators of economic growth and specialization.
Jan de Vries in particular links the changes in the number and frequency of debts listed
in probate inventories to changes in levels of specialisation and market involvement.
Contrary to the views of a classic French historiography, credit was thus viewed as a
symptom of economic progress and growth (de Vries, 1975). The advance in research
on rural credit has blurred the lines between these two models of interpretation. Recent
research, including some of the contributions in this volume, show that the relationships
between credit and economic development are far more complex than the two interpreta-
tive models sketched above and that no mono-causal model can fully explain the complex
relationship between rural credit and economic development.
II. The nature of credit in the countryside
It is clear that, in the medieval and early modern countryside, a high proportion of
credit transfers, if not total credit, was not in the form of loans, mutuum, but as sale
credit, commodatum. It is a standard of numerous studies of relatively low-level credit
agreements, especially in Northern Europe and more particularly in England, that credit
often or even typically existed in the form of late or deferred payment rather than as
money extended for an agreed term. It is evident that sale-credits are a standard of credit
agreements described in a number of the examples offered in essays in this collection,
as they have been in other earlier studies of rural credit. Within the countryside, how-
ever, most individual credit transactions, though not the bulk of credit transferred, were
typically of a different scale. In high and later medieval England, the vast majority of
small-scale credit agreements, that is the number of total transactions and credit agree-
ments, were almost certainly conducted orally and without evident security (Schofi eld,
2007; Briggs, 2009: 95–9). In the Flemish countryside of the early modern period, there
is also plentiful evidence that a signifi cant proportion of individual credit transactions
were conducted orally, even in a context where rural creditors and debtors also engaged in
credit agreements involving complex written securities (Lambrecht, this volume: 76-79).
The same was also true, for instance, in the early modern Swiss cantons (Pfi ster, 1994:
1342). Elsewhere in Europe, especially in parts of Southern Europe, a system of credit
operating through notaries tended to generate written agreements for the bulk of credit
agreements, even those that were really quite small-scale, in what has been termed ‘the
fundamental use of notarial credit’ (Drendel, 2004: 694).
Further to this, it is also evident, of course, that a great deal of credit, extended in ways
that we might not wholly describe as formal, has remained invisible to the historian. It is
only in the failure of certain of these agreements, and failures which then generated re-
corded activity generally in the form of dispute resolution of some kind, that we are aware
of elements of that ‘informal credit’. As Furio remarked in a recent essay on creditors
and debtors in high and late medieval Valencia, the extent to which this informal credit
existed is impossible to gauge; we are at least aware of the iceberg, though in this case
what we see above the water-line does not necessarily permit an accurate extraction of the
total hidden beyond our view (Furio, 2006: 23). This is a point also noted by Béaur for
eighteenth-century France in his contribution to this volume (Béaur, this volume: 153).
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