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London creditors and the fifteenth-century depression
Matthew Stevens 
The Economic History Review, Volume: 69, Issue: 4, Pages: 1083 - 1107
Swansea University Author:
Matthew Stevens
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DOI (Published version): 10.1111/ehr.12282
Abstract
Evidence of debts owed to Londoners, and contested before the royal Court of Common Pleas, allows an examination of the role of London creditors in the English depression of the fifteenth century and a reassessment of its causes. Here we examine four main issues. What is the nature of the Court of C...
| Published in: | The Economic History Review |
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| ISSN: | 0013-0117 |
| Published: |
Wiley
2016
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| Online Access: |
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa27688 |
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| Abstract: |
Evidence of debts owed to Londoners, and contested before the royal Court of Common Pleas, allows an examination of the role of London creditors in the English depression of the fifteenth century and a reassessment of its causes. Here we examine four main issues. What is the nature of the Court of Common Pleas evidence (section I)? What were the three main forms of credit offered by Londoners –unsecured cash loans, sales of goods on credit, and written instruments called bonds (section II)? What is yielded by decadal analysis of Londoners’ extension of credit in the fifteenth century –making direct comparisons with Pamela Nightingale’s published Statute Merchant and Staple data (section III)? What defines, in modern economic terms, the claim of so called ‘monetarist’ historians that credit was actively withdrawn during the depression, and how is this verified by the actions of London creditors (section IV)? It is concluded that the records of the Court of Common Pleas provide the detailed evidence monetarist historians have previously lacked both to prove that Londoners actively withdrew credit during the fifteenth century and to demonstrate that they employed pure equilibrium credit rationing in order to do so. |
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| Item Description: |
This is the peer reviewed accepted manuscript of "London creditors and the fifteenth-century depression" published in Economic History Review at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ehr.12282/epdf. |
| Keywords: |
Medieval, London, Economic history, credit |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Issue: |
4 |
| Start Page: |
1083 |
| End Page: |
1107 |