A Study Of Rural Credit In England In The 14th Centur

Walsham was a medieval village located in the county of Suffolk in south-east England.It consisted of Walsham Manor and High Hall Manor.Due to the lack of case studies and quantitative analyses,rural credit in England in the fourteenth century is still a very important but relatively weak research field.In view of this,this paper takes the Walsham village as the case study,and mainly uses the manor court rolls to carry out empirical research and comparative analysis on rural credit,so as to explore the interactions between the land market,the social structure and rural credit.In previous studies of rural credit,wealthy peasants were often the enemies of poor peasants and were regarded as exploiters,and few scholars have noted the overlap between the identity of wealthy peasants and the reeves.In the process of feudal economic transformation,credit did not become a tool for the exploitation of peasants by the lords,but an important means for peasants to accumulate material wealth.Land was the most important means of production in medieval Western European societies.Differences in land property rights between medieval England and continental Europe shaped their divergent land mortgage systems.Annuities were the main form of land mortgage in medieval rural continental Europe.In contrast,both free tenants and non-free tenants villeins in medieval England rarely mortgaged their land to raise capital.Peasants in fourteenth-century England used money lending and borrowing in kind to engage in agricultural production,reproduction activities and commercial transactions to increase agricultural productivity and profitability.Prior to the Black Death,the English peasantry,especially the non-free tenants,the villeins,were not fully controlled by the manor lords.The fact that the villeins were subject to an unfree legal status did not imply a low economic status.Lay subsidy rolls showed evidence that the economic condition of the reeves.The personal wealth of the reeves from the villeins was often at the forefront of the local rural community.Local clergy also participated in rural credit.The false plaints of the chaplains against the reeves in the manor court rolls,and the conflicts between them,suggested that credit also played a social and cultural role in rural society beyond the economic.In the process of the gradual liberation of serfs from personal dependence and the accumulation of production surpluses in medieval England,previous studies have paid little attention to the role of rural credit.Since the late Middle Ages,England’s rural economy has taken a special path that did not rely on land mortgages and had formed a rural credit network centered on the reeves.