Money and Rural Credit in the Later Middle Ages Revisited

Abstract

In a series of influential papers Nick Mayhew has argued consistently and persuasively for the importance of money in the medieval English economy. He has emphasized, in particular, that the economy was monetized — by which he means that a significant share of all payments were made in coin — from a comparatively early date. The Domesday Book, Mayhew has stressed, shows considerable evidence of rents and taxes being paid in coin in 1086 (Mayhew, 2004; 2007). This process of monetization increased further over the succeeding two centuries and more, and involved the peasantry and the rural economy in general as well as the towns in the extensive use of coin in a wide variety of transactions (Mayhew, 1995a; 2002). Another of Mayhew’s key contributions has been to emphasize the importance of monetary influences on prices, and to argue that in this regard medieval and early modern prices behaved in essentially the same fashion as prices today (Mayhew, 2013b).