Introduction

Writing in the year 1805, David Macpherson summed up his reflections on the economic legislation of later medieval England in the following words: ‘From the perusal … of most … ancient statutes relating to commerce, manufactures, fisheries and navigation, it is evident that the legislators knew nothing of the affairs which they undertook to regulate, and also that most of their ordinances, either from want of precision, or from ordering what was impossible to be obeyed,… must have been inefficient. No judicious commercial regulations could be drawn up by ecclesiastical or military men (the only classes who possessed any authority or influence) who despised trade and consequently could know nothing of it.’

This judgment upon the incapacity of medieval governments to deal with economic problems still has a certain validity. The ‘inefficiency’ and lack of grasp which Macpherson stigmatizes are not, perhaps, peculiar to the actions of medieval governments in the economic field alone; but they are as characteristic of that field as any other. It is, however, of greater significance that the very concepts of government responsibility in economic matters, either of our own day or even of Macpherson's, are anachronistic when applied to the Middle Ages. Even in most of the ‘under-developed’ parts of the modern world, it can be regarded as proper or obligatory for the central authority, apart from maintaining law and order and conducting national defence, to sustain expenditures yielding indiscriminate benefits, to issue money, to provide minimum health and education services, to aid the victims of catastrophes, and so forth.

Early Fairs and Markets

It is no longer possible nowadays to take the view that the Germanic invasions put an end to the commercial life which still characterized the last centuries of the Roman Empire. The new states which arose on all sides upon the ruins of Romania were still the scene of relatively intensive trading operations. Foreigners as well as natives took part in this economic activity. Among the former the Syrians especially attract attention. They were already to be found everywhere during the Imperial period: from Egypt to the Danube, from Spain to England. M. P. Charlesworth, among others, has fully demonstrated this point. In the fifth century Salvianus speaks of the negociatorum et Syricorum omnium turbas quae majorem ferme civitatum universarum partem occupant. These ‘Syrians’ are, however, at least in part, Greeks, and in their ranks should no doubt be included those Greek merchants of Orléans mentioned by Gregory of Tours who received a visiting Merovingian sovereign to their town with songs.

In the Midi towns especially the population was a cosmopolitan one. At Narbonne, in 589, it comprised Goths, Romans, Jews, Greeks and Syrians; certainly these three last groups lived primarily by trade. The Jews, who were numerous throughout Gaul and in Spain, were frequently forbidden to possess and to traffic in Christian slaves, a fact which is proof that they did play an important role in this trade.

Port organization continued to follow the Roman pattern, witness the catabolus or cataplus of Marseilles found in Gregory of Tours and in a document of Clovis III dated 692. Further evidence is to be found in the thelonearii who welcomed to Visigothic Spain the transmarini negociatores

Introductory

Is it proper to speak of the economic policies of medieval towns? The answer must depend on the definition. If this is overexacting, if we demand both explicit statements by medieval townsmen of their aims and methods, and proof that these were then applied in practice, we strike at the roots of the whole subject; study would then be restricted to such rare congruences as that between the industrial protectionism advocated by Lippo Brandolini in his De comparatione reipublicae and the policy of fifteenth-century Florence. A more liberal and more realistic attitude will allow far greater scope. There is abundant evidence in the preambles to municipal statutes, in the reports of chroniclers, in the arguments used by interested bodies in economic disputes, that principles informed practice. Sometimes the aims and ideas made public were those which really gave coherence to economic activity, sometimes they were a dishonest façade hiding a shabby structure of selfishness and opportunism. Yet the most disingenuous statements of policy have their value; they argue a need to indulge popular belief that certain patterns and principles of economic behaviour were good and useful.

It is reasonable to use another type of evidence—indirect evidence. This consists of the elements of regularity and consistency in urban economic practice. Where there are such regular trends the policy of a town may be considered as less or more ‘conscious’, but policy it is so long as the regularities are genuine and can be referred to probable motives. Medieval townsfolk did not always expound the aims and ideas which underlay their activities—they did not trouble, they would not, they could not; when they did their words may have been lost. Common sense suggests that hidden motives may properly be deduced from known practice.

Introductory: Main Features and Phases

Scholars have been inclined in the past to regard the entire medieval period as a primitive stage in the development of public credit. In part this was the legacy of views expressed most clearly in the second half of the nineteenth century by Bruno Hildebrand (1864) and his followers who treated the Middle Ages as a time when credit could play at best only a minor part. These basic assumptions are today discarded by historians. But one particular argument much used in the past deserves more detailed comment. Some older scholars had attached great importance to the fact that the debts of medieval rulers were, almost invariably, regarded as the personal obligations of the reigning sovereigns. They maintained that it is, therefore, impossible to speak of a true national or state debt under medieval conditions. Continuity, it was stressed, could only come with the introduction of modern funded debt. Only the municipalities have been exempted from this charge of backwardness, because they sold annuities, and they have even been hailed as the true creators of public credit.

It is quite legitimate and valuable to stress the contrasts between the medieval and the modern forms of public borrowing. But it would be misleading to apply to the medieval public credit this particular test. The presence or absence of the funded debt cannot be a valid criterion of the importance of the credit transactions of the territorial rulers at any time or place in medieval Europe. The treatment of the debts of medieval rulers as personal obligations of the princes who contracted them was an inevitable consequence of the prevailing, purely personal, conception of sovereign power. But the practical consequences of this must not be exaggerated.

A General Picture

From the point of view of business organization, the Middle Ages present no uniform picture either in time or in space. During the so-called Dark Ages, the manorial economy was dominant and most landed estates were relatively self-sufficient. Exchange, at any rate, was reduced to a minimum, and trade, while it did not disappear altogether, fell to a low ebb. What little survived was carried on by groups of travelling merchants who catered for the rich by selling them luxuries or who exploited the poor by charging high prices for necessities in times of famine or distress. A real revival did not occur until the eleventh century with the cessation of the Norman invasions and the decline of feudal anarchy. In Italy urban life regained vigour; in Flanders it sprang up anew. From these two centres, the movement spread and gained momentum. The Crusades gave it further impetus. Latin merchant colonies were established all over the Levant. Soon the Venetians, the Genoese and the Pisans controlled the foreign trade of the Byzantine Empire. Methods of business organization made steady progress, but the merchants continued to be peregrinators, moving constantly about in unending pursuit of profit. They and their servants still accompanied their goods either by land or by sea. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the travelling trade of western Europe gravitated to the fairs of Champagne, and their rhythm regulated the coming and going of the merchant caravans from Italy, Flanders, Germany and all corners of France.

Introduction

It is, in general terms, somewhat hazardous to speak of ‘economic policies’ in connection with the Middle Ages. This applies even more particularly in the Low Countries than it does elsewhere. Before the Burgundian period this part of Europe did not constitute a political entity, but was divided into a number of territorial principalities, feudally dependent some upon the Empire and some upon France. Their small extent and the limited range of the interests at work in each of them were hardly likely to move princes to take account of economic considerations in drawing up their political schemes. Doubtless we must differentiate somewhat between the various provinces. Flanders, certainly, was more thickly populated than its neighbours, its political structure was stronger, and its economic life (particularly its trade and industry) was more intensive. It also numbered amongst its rulers some remarkable princes, and most notably Philip of Alsace, who were distinguished amongst their contemporaries for the lead they gave in this department of statecraft. For these reasons, examples drawn from the history of Flanders must inevitably bulk large in what follows.

At the same time it is important to note that, in some respects, the very fact that regions like Brabant or Holland developed economically much later than Flanders gave rise in itself to economic policies in these two principalities for which no equivalent is to be found in Flanders. Their rulers endeavoured, by positive intervention, to stimulate the growth of forms of commerce and industry of which they had been able to observe the beneficial effects in Flanders, though there they had arisen through the free play of economic forces.

The Empire which collapsed in 476 left a rich legacy of economic and social thought which survived its political structure and remained untouched by historical accident. This inheritance consisted primarily of moral principles, derived from the Gospels and defined by the Fathers, and of habits of thought formed in the Roman world.

In East and West alike, Christianity had flowered among peoples accustomed to certain economic and social institutions deemed natural or commonly accepted and regulated by laws: for example, property and slavery. It did not reject outright the learned or popular view of these traditional institutions, but it introduced a conception of man and of human relationships which modified and threatened existing customs and, indeed, the very foundations of society. By their commentaries upon the Scriptures, by their enlargements upon precepts and counsels, the Doctors, and especially Ambrose and Augustine, established the whole programme of a new system of ethics, the fiats and the interdicts of which were already sanctioned by popes and councils.

Thus, as early as the end of the fifth century, the fundamental conceptions about economy and society had been enunciated in Christian literature and in the imperial legal codes. The barbarian and feudal periods were to do no more than preserve this accumulated wealth of ideas, which came to sudden fruition at the time of the twelfth-century renaissance and the scholastic period.

In a broad introduction we shall trace the external history, as represented by the environment and sources; then consider successively the conceptions of economy and of society before summing up, in conclusion, the principal repercussions of these conceptions upon the practice of nations.

Introduction

A human community whose members are predominantly engaged in agriculture is unlikely to exceed a village in importance. A concentration of an urban character presupposes, in fact, the presence of a population whose resources are of quite a different order.

There are towns which, from the economic point of view, operate essentially as consumers. They obtain the means of purchasing the consumption goods their inhabitants require from dues derived from a variety of external sources, or receive these dues directly in kind. This was the position of such political and religious centres as Imperial Rome and Papal Rome. It was the position, too, of many civitates in the early Middle Ages, formerly Roman administrative centres with active populations of merchants and craftsmen, but now devitalized and inhabited primarily by clerical communities living on the produce of episcopal and abbatial domains.

Nevertheless, town-dwellers normally have an economic function as producers, not, of course, in agriculture, but in trade and in industry. In such cases, towns are at once producers and consumers.

In this chapter the history of the town will be studied in relation to economic history. We shall consider it in some measure from its beginnings, bearing in mind that in the Carolingian period the towns, as centres of population, were of slight importance. It should not be forgotten, however, that what then existed in the way of towns, and what in large measure would serve as the basis for later development, was inherited from earlier times.

Government Finance

The history of government finance in the countries of the Baltic area in the later Middle Ages suffers generally from a lack of sources. It is normally impossible to express economic realities for this area in statistical terms. Financial records were poor from the beginning and have been preserved only in a fragmentary fashion; but even if they had been preserved without loss, they would probably still have told only an unsatisfactory tale of what really happened. It is not before the period of centralized royal governments that we first have the chance of surveying financial development with any degree of certainty. Even at this stage, however, although some figures are available, they are scarcely ever of a sort which would permit safe deductions about the rise and fall of revenue.

For our knowledge of government finance we are consequently thrown back for the most part upon legal and political documents and what we know of the political circumstances of the time. Such material, clearly, provides only glimpses of economic conditions and hints about the crucial economic problems of government. On the other hand, it does reveal the relationship between needs and resources—the activities of kings and dukes and their counsellors which called for expenditure, and the measures they took to obtain some sort of financial balance. It is in any case impossible to estimate the taxable capacity of a medieval people; at least in the political sources we get evidence of the limits of its willingness to pay taxes. So the history of government finance in the medieval states of northern Europe is the history of state administrations wrestling with economic difficulties of which we only now and then get a clear view.

The Problems of Gild History

The occupational gilds of the west are one of the best-known forms of medieval association, familiar both on account of their long post-medieval career, and because they had early lent themselves to the ordering of economic and political life in urban society. Their traditions of corporate charity and piety further attest that they were once genuine communities within the larger community, with a social and religious character transcending mere economic interest and struggle for power. The economic historian has to study every aspect of the gilds, but always with an eye to the central problem of their influence on the economy. Did the various means by which they sought to secure their members' interests, as these were conceived at the time, retard or stimulate economic growth? Did gilds hinder or promote the flow of trade? Did they try to expand the market for manufactured goods? Had they any general policies regarding innovation? Did they affect at all the amount of saving or the direction of investment?

If we plot our earliest information as to the organization of gilds on a map, dating their appearance in each local industry, we immediately narrow the scope of these inquiries in two ways. In the first place, it becomes apparent that, so far as artisans were concerned, the craft gilds were of little account before the thirteenth century. In the great economic expansion of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, artisan gilds were too few and too scattered to have exercised any effective influence either as help or as hindrance. It was not until the latter part of the thirteenth century, when the expansion was slowing down, that they became at all widespread. They multiplied most rapidly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, often in circumstances of population decline, trade recession and fiscal crisis. In the second place, certain types of town were clearly more favourable to a gild movement than others.

Introductory

The nature and the scope of government action in relation to economic affairs are, generally speaking, problems of medieval history which still await detailed investigation. An attempt to clear the ground for such an investigation within the territorial limits roughly defined by the modern frontiers of France and England demands, first, that some brief notice should be taken of the broad political and economic context within which government economic action took place in the two countries. These modern states were being created in medieval times, but the work of creation was long and uneven. The retreat of Rome and the barbarian invasions left Britain much more deeply fragmented and with a far smaller direct legacy from the Roman order than Gaul; yet England achieved a measure of unity at a time when the dispersal of authority across the Channel was reaching its extreme point. The work of unification of the West-Saxon, Anglo-Danish and Anglo-Norman kings, moreover, proved substantially enduring: thenceforward there was no authority comparable to that of the Crown. In France, on the other hand, the legacies of Rome and of barbarian kingship were dissipated in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the reconstitution of authority was in the first instance as much the work of great feudatories (the prime beneficiaries of the dispersal of power) as of the monarchy. For many generations, therefore, ‘regalian powers’ (including powers of economic direction) were shared in varying proportions between the Crown and the great provincial magnates. There were also substantial areas of French territory which were for long periods appendages to foreign kingdoms: Normandy and Gascony to England, Provence to the Empire or the Angevin kingdom of Naples. Medieval France comprehended a number of 'states' of which the kingdom was only one, each pursuing policies to a greater or lesser degree independent though not necessarily dissimilar.

Introduction

One of the most difficult problems confronting the historian of economic policy in the Middle Ages is to decide what constituted in those days the field of ‘economic policy’. We might define ‘economic policy’ today as ‘public policy in respect of the economic life of a country’; but, although this definition is so wide and elastic as to be almost elusive, it still remains difficult to adapt to it the remote reality of the Middle Ages.

Thus the fact that by economic policy we commonly mean a public policy is a source of uncertainty when we transfer such a concept to the medieval period. In dealing with the centuries preceding our millennium, it is often difficult to say whether the monarchs of that time in taking certain measures were acting as public authorities or as individuals. It is also difficult to decide whether a study of ‘economic policy’ in those centuries should take into consideration the provisions made and the programmes carried out by ecclesiastical or secular lords in the administration of their own manors, since we cannot disregard the fact that feudal lords were no less public authorities than the kings or emperors. The very distinction between public and private was blurred in the minds of men before the year 1000.

Even after that time, the distinction was not at once apparent. In fields like that of finance princes and monarchs continued to behave in such a way that it is difficult to say whether they acted as public bodies or as private individuals. On the other hand, it would be difficult to deny the appellation of ‘public’ to institutions like the gilds and similar corporations merely because we today do not recognize certain associations of workers and entrepreneurs as public bodies. To take an example, the corporations of merchants or merchant gilds in the Italian medieval towns were empowered and obliged to supervise and maintain the thoroughfares, to scrutinize prices and wages, to deal directly with foreign governments, drawing up actual commercial treaties in the name of their own cities.

Roman-Barbarian Continuity

The collapse of the Roman Empire in the West was so prolonged a process that to expect to find any cataclysmic change in the coinage would be unreasonable. No such violent change or lengthy cessation of coinage occurred except in Britain. After the Roman departure no further coin entered the country, and within a generation, by about A.D. 435, coin had ceased to be used as a medium of exchange. Not until the latter part of the seventh century were coins again used in Britain other than as jewellery. Elsewhere continuity was maintained. The barbarian ‘allies’ took over the Roman mints which continued to strike in the names of the emperors.

The coinage of the late Roman Empire reflected its economic decrepitude. On the one hand there was a highly valued gold coin, the solidus, introduced by Constantine, of fine gold, weighing 24 siliquae (about 4 48 gm.), together with its half, the semissis, and third, the tremissis or triens. On the other hand there was the heavy copper follis, revived by Anastasius I in 498 as a coin of forty nummi, and its poor relations down to the nummus. Between were the sparsely issued silver siliquae and half-siliquae, twenty-four siliquae being worth a solidus. The magnificent gold coinage served for imperial gifts and the payment of subsidies to imperial ‘allies’ such as the 50,000 solidi paid by Maurice Tiberius to Chilperic in 584. It was only of importance within the Empire because taxes had to be paid in gold. The prolific bronze coinage was of use only for the multiplicity of small local payments. Neither was of much use in commerce, and the small silver coinage came to an end under Justinian (527-65).

It is the fault of most writing on the history of art in the nineteenth century that art and architecture are kept separate. Admittedly, it is not easy to see a unity of style between Scott's St Pancras of 1868 and Monet's St Lazare of 1877. Moreover, one is discouraged from any efforts at formulating such a unity by the crashing drop in aesthetic quality directly one moves from the most familiar works of painting to the most familiar works of architecture. No one can deny the truth of this value judgement, but there is also a fallacy involved. One tends to forget official painting and non-official architecture, the one as bad as any insurance company headquarters, the other not as good, but occasionally nearly as good, as Monet and Seurat. If one is aware of the whole evidence, a treatment can be attempted doing justice to all its aspects. The only difficulty which remains is that the layman—and in this respect nearly everybody is a layman—knows much about the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, but near to nothing about Philip Webb and Norman Shaw, H. H. Richardson and Stanford White, and indeed Antoni Gaudí.

This is one reason why painting is taken first in this chapter. Another is that the nineteenth century was indeed a century of the dominance of painting, aesthetically as well as socially. The dominance had been established before the year 1870. Socially speaking the patron of 1870 was no longer the patron of 1770. About 1770 the social situation of art had still been that of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque.