London Before the Bank: Money, Credit, and Trust, c. 1340–1560
Why my new economic-history project at Birkbeck starts two centuries before the Financial Revolution—and asks how London made promises credible when coin itself could not always be taken for granted
Category: Economic History
Keywords: Economic history; London; medieval economy; Tudor economy; money; credit; trust; bullion famine; Great Debasement; guilds; livery companies; debt; recognisances; institutional economics; monetary history; financial history; state formation
Next month I begin a new research project at Birkbeck, University of London. Its formal title is Money, Credit, and Trust in London, c. 1340–1560: The Institutional Architecture of a Pre-Banking Financial Centre. Birkbeck’s published 2026–27 calendar places the beginning of the autumn term on 5 October 2026, which makes this a useful point to explain what I am trying to do, why I think the question matters, and what I expect the archival work to add to economic history.
The title is deliberately about three things rather than one. Money matters, obviously. But money alone does not explain an economy. Credit matters because economies repeatedly require transactions to occur before final payment can occur. Trust matters because credit is meaningless unless there is some reason to believe that a promise made today will still possess value tomorrow.
That final point is the centre of the project.
London was a major commercial centre for centuries before the Bank of England was founded in 1694. It had merchants, long-distance trade, debt, bills, written obligations, sureties, sophisticated courts, guilds and livery companies, accounting systems, foreign merchant communities, and elaborate procedures for enforcing promises. What it did not possess was the later English institutional configuration of deposit banking, central banking, funded public debt, and organised securities markets that tends to dominate the conventional story of the rise of modern finance.
That produces a deceptively simple question:
How did London make promises credible when the monetary environment itself was repeatedly unreliable?
A coin can settle a debt. It cannot explain why somebody was willing to extend the debt in the first place.
The problem with beginning financial history in 1694
The creation of the Bank of England is an obvious historical landmark. So are the funded national debt, the expansion of secondary markets in public securities, and the bundle of institutional innovations conventionally described as the English Financial Revolution. P. G. M. Dickson’s classic study remains foundational, and later work by Bruce Carruthers, Anne Murphy, Carl Wennerlind and others has greatly improved our understanding of public credit, political conflict, investment, speculation and the social foundations of financial credibility (Carruthers, 1996; Dickson, 1967; Murphy, 2009; Wennerlind, 2011).
But landmarks are dangerous things. They are useful for navigation precisely because they make the surrounding terrain look smaller.
If one begins in the 1690s, earlier English financial history can easily become a prelude: an assortment of incomplete institutions waiting for modernity to arrive. I do not think that is a satisfactory way to frame the problem. The merchants of fifteenth-century London were not rehearsing for the opening of the Bank of England. A recognisance was not an immature government bond. A guild surety arrangement was not an inefficient credit-rating agency. There is no analytical gain in giving medieval institutions modern names merely to make them look familiar.
The better question is what those institutions did in their own setting.
The medieval monetary literature has already reconstructed an enormous amount about coinage, mint output, bullion supply, circulation and monetary contraction. The work of Peter Spufford, John Munro, Pamela Nightingale, Martin Allen, James Bolton and Nicholas Mayhew establishes much of the terrain on which any serious study of English medieval money must operate (Allen, 2012; Bolton, 2012; Mayhew, 1995; Munro, 1983; Nightingale, 1995; Spufford, 1988).
What interests me is the next layer down.
Suppose the circulating stock of specie contracts. What does a London merchant actually do on Tuesday morning?
Suppose silver remains scarce for decades rather than months. Which obligations are postponed, netted, assigned, guaranteed, formally enrolled, privately arbitrated or litigated? Who will accept a promise rather than coin? Under what conditions? Does guild membership change the answer? Does an enrolled recognisance change it? Does the identity of a surety matter? Does repeated dealing matter? Does the choice of forum matter?
Then change the shock. Suppose the problem is no longer simply too little good money, but money whose metallic content has been deliberately degraded. Does the same credit architecture respond in the same way?
That is where monetary history becomes institutional history.
What I mean by “pre-banking”
The phrase pre-banking financial centre needs a qualification because it is very easy to misunderstand.
It does not mean that medieval London lacked banking functions. Italian merchant-bankers operated in England. Bills of exchange, book transfers, merchant credit, deposit-like arrangements and sophisticated international settlement techniques existed in Europe long before 1694. Nor does it mean that London was financially isolated from continental practice. It plainly was not.
The claim is institutional rather than semantic.
I am interested in London before the later English system made a bank the obvious intermediary through which a large range of credit relationships could be channelled. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the machinery of credibility is often more visible precisely because it is distributed. The creditor may rely on a surety, the status of a company member, a recognisance, a civic court, a private arbitration procedure, the debtor’s reputation, the existence of repeat dealing, or some combination of all of them.
A mature banking system can make those underlying mechanisms appear automatic. It can compress information, screening, enforcement and settlement into the institution’s own balance sheet and procedures.
A pre-banking system leaves more of the machinery exposed.
That makes it historically interesting.
Two centuries of monetary stress
The chronology is not simply a convenient container for the thesis. It creates the comparative design.
The project begins around 1340, so that I can reconstruct the institutional landscape before the prolonged contractions usually associated with the later medieval bullion famines. It then moves through the first major period of bullion scarcity, roughly c. 1370–1420; a period of recovery and adaptation; the renewed contraction of approximately c. 1440–1480; and finally the very different monetary disturbance created by Henry VIII’s Great Debasement and its aftermath.
These events should not be collapsed into a single variable called crisis.
A shortage of good silver coin presents one institutional problem. A circulating medium whose metallic content is being systematically degraded presents another. One reduces the availability of a trusted settlement medium. The other attacks confidence in the quality of the medium itself.
That distinction is central to the design.
Figure 1. The project treats the bullion famines and the Great Debasement as different institutional tests rather than one undifferentiated monetary crisis.
The first bullion famine gives me an opportunity to examine how existing institutions behaved under sustained scarcity. The recovery period then allows a second question: which adaptations disappeared when conditions improved and which remained? The second bullion famine provides a further test of whether repeated exposure generated deeper institutional change. Finally, the Great Debasement supplies a different kind of monetary shock against which the earlier responses can be compared.
This is not a natural experiment in the modern econometric sense. Henry VIII did not randomise debasement for the convenience of future researchers. The periods also differ in war, trade, demography, politics and institutional maturity. Any claim of causation therefore needs discipline.
But the chronology does provide a sequence of historically distinct stress regimes.
A crisis does not merely damage institutions. It can reveal which institutions economic actors trust enough to use when conditions become difficult.
Credit is not the opposite of money
One reason this project matters is that money and credit are too often discussed as though they were substitutes in a simple mechanical sense: less coin, therefore more credit.
The relationship is more interesting.
A shortage of coin does not cause exchange simply to stop. Actors can extend payment periods, increase book credit, use sureties, transfer obligations, net balances, rely on bills and written instruments, seek formal enrolment, use arbitration or move disputes into legal forums.
But every one of those responses relocates the underlying problem rather than abolishing it.
A cash transaction asks whether the coin is acceptable.
A credit transaction asks whether the debtor, guarantor, document, association, legal forum or enforcement mechanism is acceptable.
This is why the thesis is fundamentally about trust. I am not using trust to mean optimism, friendship or a vague cultural disposition. I am using it as an institutional problem. A creditor parts with value now because some combination of information, reputation, guarantee, formal documentation, law and expected sanction makes future performance sufficiently credible.
The mechanisms can be distinguished analytically even when they overlap historically.
Personal surety makes another person’s reputation or assets part of the obligation. Company membership can supply information about identity and status. Repeat dealing creates a future cost to opportunism. Arbitration may lower the cost and delay of enforcement. Formal enrolment may strengthen the evidentiary or legal position of a claim. Courts supply coercive enforcement when voluntary performance fails. Reputation links the outcome of one transaction to access to future transactions.
None of these is trust by itself.
Together they form an architecture through which trust can be manufactured.
Figure 2. Creditworthiness is treated as an institutional outcome produced by overlapping information, guarantee, formalisation and enforcement mechanisms.
This framing also explains why simply counting coins cannot answer the thesis question. Mint-output estimates and estimates of money supply are indispensable because they establish the monetary environment. They cannot tell us how a particular promise became credible enough to substitute for immediate settlement.
That requires transactions.
From macroeconomic shortage to the Tuesday-morning transaction
The macroeconomic literature gives us the large variables: bullion flows, mint output, the size of the circulating stock, changes in fineness, prices and, with appropriate caution, the velocity of circulation. The archival problem is to connect those variables to actual commercial behaviour.
My interest is therefore not merely whether credit existed. Of course it did.
The question is whether its composition changed.
During a scarcity episode, do we observe more sureties per obligation? More formal enrolment? More resort to city courts? Changes in the value distribution of recognisances? Greater reliance on company arbitration? Different patterns among insiders and outsiders? Longer chains of obligation? A shift in the relative use of documentary forms? A measurable change in enforcement outcomes?
Then comes the persistence test.
If a mechanism becomes more common in a crisis and disappears when liquidity returns, that suggests one kind of adaptation. If it remains in regular use after the monetary conditions that encouraged it have changed, that suggests institutionalisation.
That distinction is important because historical institutional change is often inferred from first appearance. But first appearance is weak evidence. Emergency devices can vanish. Experimental practices can fail. Institutions can be borrowed temporarily and then abandoned.
Persistence is harder evidence.
The archive: where the argument has to earn its keep
The project is archival at its core.
The city evidence begins with the Plea and Memoranda Rolls and related London court material. These records contain a remarkable mixture of litigation, recognisances, obligations and administrative business. They make it possible to move below national monetary aggregates and observe individual disputes and formalised transactions.
The livery companies provide a different institutional lens. The Merchant Taylors are particularly valuable. The Company’s own current archive description confirms that accounts survive from 1398 and that the otherwise later run of court minutes includes the exceptional surviving years 1486–1493. Matthew Davies’s edition of those minutes is therefore not merely a convenient published source; it opens a rare institutional window at almost exactly the point at which the second bullion famine and its aftermath matter to the project (Davies, 2000).
The Goldsmiths matter for obvious reasons. Their relationship to precious metal, bullion, assaying and monetary expertise makes them impossible to ignore in a study in which the quality and supply of metallic money are themselves variables. The Mercers provide another route into long-distance commerce and international credit relationships. The wider livery-company ecology matters because association can generate information, enforcement and exclusion simultaneously.
The Crown and Exchequer supply another layer. The National Archives’ Exchequer material preserves the administrative view of royal finance, customs, obligations and monetary management. Close and Patent Rolls, Exchequer series and related records help reconstruct the policy environment in which merchants were making private decisions.
Numismatic evidence provides an independent check. Coin composition, mint output and hoard evidence cannot tell me who trusted whom, but they constrain what can plausibly be said about the monetary environment in which trust had to be produced. Allen’s reconstruction of English minting is particularly important because it joins institutional structure to the quantitative history of coin production (Allen, 2012).
The key methodological principle is therefore triangulation.
Figure 3. No single archive is treated as a transparent representation of “the credit system.” Different sources have different selection processes, which is precisely why they need to be read together.
Court records are not a random sample of economic life. They disproportionately record obligations that became contested, required formalisation or reached a point at which enforcement mattered. Guild records select for members and matters falling within company jurisdiction. Crown documents see the economy through administrative categories. Hoards contain money that was deliberately or accidentally removed from circulation; they are not a random draw from every coin in every purse.
The answer is not to pretend those biases disappear.
It is to use sources whose biases are different.
Building a transaction-level history
The methodological ambition is to reconstruct mechanisms at the level of transactions without turning the archive into a collection of colourful anecdotes.
That requires data.
For selected periods, transactions and disputes will be coded by date, parties, occupational or company affiliation where it can be identified, value, instrument type, surety structure, forum, enforcement mechanism, outcome and other characteristics supported by the documents. A further layer will classify the principal credibility mechanism involved: personal surety, associational support, formal legal enrolment, repeat dealing, reputational enforcement, or combinations of these.
The distinction between what is directly observed and what is inferred will be explicit.
That sounds obvious, but historical datasets frequently blur it. A record may tell us that two named individuals acted as sureties. It does not automatically tell us why those two people were chosen. A guild connection may be demonstrable; a claim about friendship may not be. A repeated pair of names can be observed; an inferred trust relationship must be justified.
I want the coding structure to preserve those differences rather than erase them.
The project also does not require the fantasy of reading every surviving document continuously from 1340 to 1560 and then calling exhaustion a methodology. The design is based on dense cross-sections around selected crisis and comparison periods, typically three to five years where the archival survival allows it.
This gives the thesis leverage.
A crisis-period sample without a baseline is almost useless for identifying adaptation because every feature of the crisis archive can be mistaken for a crisis response. A baseline allows comparison. A recovery period allows persistence to be tested. A second shock allows repeated adaptation to be distinguished from one-off improvisation. A qualitatively different shock allows the function of the institution itself to be probed.
The objective is not to maximise the number of observations.
It is to make the observations interpretable.
Quantification without counterfeit precision
Economic history is at its best when it can use quantification without becoming hypnotised by it.
There will be variables that can be measured with reasonable consistency: counts of recognisances, nominal values, identified sureties, company membership, litigation outcomes, intervals between stages of a dispute, or the use of particular forms. Those can support formal comparison.
There will also be variables that cannot be measured cleanly across the whole period. Record survival changes. Administrative practice changes. The meaning of a documentary category can change. A source can become more verbose without the underlying economy becoming more complex.
Those problems are not nuisances to be cleaned away. They are part of the evidentiary structure.
A statistically significant result extracted from incomparable records is not improved by possessing three decimal places.
Where the sources justify counts, rates or distributions, I will use them. Where they justify only bounded comparison or qualitative mechanism tracing, I will do that instead. The aim is not to make medieval London look like a modern administrative panel dataset. It is to exploit quantitative structure where the archive genuinely contains it.
There is no virtue in converting archival uncertainty into a decimal point.
Guilds: institutions of trust, and institutions of power
Guilds and livery companies are central to the project precisely because they should not be romanticised.
There is an attractive institutional story in which company membership solves several problems at once. Members are identifiable. Reputation circulates. Repeat interaction makes opportunism costly. Internal discipline can sanction misconduct. Arbitration can reduce enforcement costs. Admission rules can supply information about status or training. A company can act as a network through which information about a debtor travels.
Some of that may be correct.
It is not the whole story.
An institution capable of protecting insiders is also capable of excluding outsiders. Rules that improve information can create barriers to entry. Collective enforcement can become collective privilege. Networks can generate trust among members by raising the costs faced by non-members. Institutions can reduce transaction costs for one group while imposing them on another.
Ogilvie’s comparative work is useful here because it makes it impossible simply to infer economic efficiency from the longevity of a guild (Ogilvie, 2019). Nightingale’s detailed work on the Grocers, meanwhile, demonstrates how trade, corporate organisation, politics and Crown relations were intertwined rather than cleanly separable spheres (Nightingale, 1995). Davies and Saunders make the institutional history of the Merchant Taylors accessible in precisely the level of detail needed to ask how company governance interacted with the wider city economy (Davies & Saunders, 2004).
My question is therefore not: Were guilds good for credit?
It is narrower and testable.
Under what conditions did company affiliation alter the production of a credible promise? Did it supply information? Did it provide guarantors? Did it lower enforcement costs? Did discipline inside the company affect access to credit outside it? Were those benefits restricted to insiders? Did they become more valuable during periods of monetary stress?
The answer may differ by company, occupation and period.
That is a feature, not a defect.
Law is part of the financial system
There is a persistent habit of treating law as though it arrives after the financial transaction, mainly to clean up defaults.
That misunderstands credit.
The legal system affects a promise before the promise is made because parties form expectations about what will happen if it is broken. A debt instrument backed by rapid, predictable and credible enforcement is a different economic object from an otherwise identical promise backed by uncertain procedure.
Late medieval London contained overlapping jurisdictions and mechanisms. Common-law actions, city custom, recognisances, merchant procedures, company arbitration and statutory forms did not simply occupy separate constitutional boxes. Economic actors could select among them, combine them and react to changes in their relative cost or effectiveness.
Earlier legislation such as Acton Burnell, the Statute of Merchants and the Statute of the Staple had already attempted to strengthen mechanisms for the recognition and enforcement of merchant debts. Later changes in contractual remedies and Tudor legislation altered the environment again.
The important issue is not to compile a list of statutes.
It is to observe use.
A legal mechanism that exists magnificently on parchment but is rarely selected by merchants has a different institutional significance from one that becomes part of routine commercial practice. Conversely, an informal procedure may matter enormously even if it lacks the theatrical dignity of statute, provided economic actors repeatedly rely upon it.
The law is therefore not merely a source of evidence for this project. It is one of the mechanisms being studied.
Crown policy and commercial adaptation
The relationship between the Crown and London’s commercial community is another reason to study the period over the long run.
Monetary policy was not imposed on an inert economy. Recoinage, bullion regulation, mint policy, fiscal demands and debasement created constraints to which merchants, companies and civic institutions had to respond.
Sometimes public and private institutions may have been complementary. A statutory or royal mechanism could strengthen a commercial practice. At other times city institutions may have compensated for policy failure. In the strongest version of the argument, parts of London’s credit architecture may have become more important precisely because royal monetary management made the settlement environment less reliable.
That proposition needs careful handling. “The Crown caused it” is not an explanation unless the mechanism can be shown.
The transaction-level evidence is where the claim must be tested. If formal guarantees, legal enrolment or associational enforcement become more valuable under particular monetary regimes, the archive should leave traces. If merchants instead absorb the shock through prices, exchange rates or a change in the composition of coin, then the institutional response may be weaker than expected.
The interesting question is the boundary between public monetary authority and private institutional adaptation.
That boundary is also part of the history of state formation.
Scarcity and debasement are not the same experiment
The Great Debasement is analytically valuable because it changes the nature of the monetary problem.
A bullion famine is fundamentally about scarcity, even though the magnitude, chronology and causal mechanisms remain subjects of historical debate. Munro put bullion flows and monetary contraction at the centre of the later-medieval discussion, while later work by Allen, Bolton, Mayhew and others has refined the quantitative picture (Allen, 2012; Bolton, 2012; Mayhew, 1995; Munro, 1983).
Debasement is different.
If good coin is scarce, credit can economise on coin. A promise allows exchange to occur now and settlement to occur later.
If the coin itself is distrusted because its metallic content has been degraded, extending the settlement date does not necessarily solve the problem. It may simply postpone the question of what unit, weight or quality will be tendered when the debt falls due.
That creates useful empirical predictions.
If surety and legal enforcement intensify under both scarcity and debasement, those mechanisms may be responding to a general rise in transactional uncertainty.
If a mechanism responds strongly to scarcity but weakly to debasement, it may function primarily as a substitute for immediate liquidity.
If contracts alter the way payment is specified during debasement, the relevant response may concern monetary quality rather than the availability of credit.
If actors shift toward particular accounting units, foreign coins, bullion clauses or other settlement conventions, then monetary trust and interpersonal creditworthiness become analytically separable.
This is one reason the project runs through the mid-sixteenth century rather than ending around 1480.
The final period changes the experiment.
Institutional economics as a question generator
The project draws on institutional economics, but I do not intend to use theory as a stencil laid over the archive.
North provides a vocabulary for institutions and institutional change; Greif makes repeated interaction, beliefs and enforcement central to the analysis of historical exchange; Ogilvie supplies an essential warning that durable institutions can produce rents and exclusion as well as efficiency (Greif, 2006; North, 1990; Ogilvie, 2019).
Those frameworks are useful because they force specific questions.
What information did a creditor possess?
What information could be credibly verified?
What sanction existed if a debtor failed?
Who bore the cost of enforcement?
Did association reduce information asymmetry?
Did a surety shift expected loss or simply redistribute it?
Did repeated dealing discipline behaviour?
Could a legal form be transferred or enforced more cheaply than an informal promise?
Did an institution lower transaction costs generally, or only for insiders?
These are better questions than saying that a guild “created trust” or that a court “supported commerce.”
But the evidence has veto power.
If the archive contradicts the theoretical prediction, the theory does not win by definition. The point of institutional economics here is to generate mechanisms precise enough to be rejected.
Repertoires, not revolutions
The phrase that increasingly captures what I want the project to test is repertoires, not revolutions.
The conventional language of a Financial Revolution is useful when describing the striking reorganisation of English public finance around the late seventeenth century. Dickson’s formulation survives because something genuinely important happened (Dickson, 1967).
The danger begins when revolution is converted from a description of rapid institutional change into a claim of creation from nothing.
Economic actors rarely confront a crisis with an empty toolbox.
They inherit legal forms, accounting practices, organisational structures, social networks, habits of enforcement and memories of previous crises. Some are discarded. Some are recombined. Some acquire new functions. Some become formal. Others move in the opposite direction. Occasionally genuinely novel institutions appear.
I want to examine that available repertoire.
This avoids two opposite errors.
The first is discontinuity: the idea that modern finance suddenly materialised after 1688 and that earlier centuries matter mainly as picturesque background.
The second is teleology: the idea that every medieval bond, recognisance or company procedure was an embryo whose natural destiny was the Bank of England.
Neither is convincing.
A more plausible hypothesis is that London accumulated a repertoire of techniques for making obligations credible. Later actors inherited some, transformed others and abandoned many more. Institutional history then looks like a branching process rather than a straight road to 1694.
An institution is not an ancestor merely because a historian can draw an arrow between two dates.
What would count as evidence against my argument?
A useful research programme should be capable of disappointing the researcher.
My working expectation is that repeated monetary crisis increased reliance on particular mechanisms of credit and enforcement, and that at least some of those adaptations persisted beyond the crises that intensified their use. I also expect the second bullion famine to show deeper institutional adjustment than the first, and the Great Debasement to produce a distinguishable response because it affected monetary quality rather than merely monetary quantity.
Those are propositions to investigate, not conclusions to announce before opening the boxes.
Several results could force revision.
The composition of credit mechanisms might change very little across monetary regimes. If so, institutional stability becomes more interesting than adaptation.
Apparent increases in litigation might vanish once changes in record survival or administrative practice are taken into account.
Company records might show that guild institutions were less important for the enforcement of commercial credit than expected.
City courts might prove secondary to private settlement.
Changes attributed to bullion scarcity might align more closely with war, plague, trade disruption or political instability.
Supposed innovations might disappear as soon as monetary conditions improve.
The second bullion famine might not show deeper institutionalisation than the first.
Debasement might produce a weaker change in contractual form than the analytical model predicts.
Any of those findings would change the thesis.
That is why the comparative structure matters. Looking only at crisis documents makes every institution look like a crisis response. Looking only at successful institutions makes survival look inevitable.
Comparison is what makes the argument testable.
Why Birkbeck
The intellectual fit with Birkbeck is unusually close to the problem.
Matthew Davies is Professor of Urban History and has worked extensively on medieval and early modern London, its economy, government, trades and guilds. He directed the Records of London’s Livery Companies Online project and edited the early Merchant Taylors’ court minutes that sit directly inside my source base.
Brodie Waddell approaches English economic history from the later side of my chronology. His work on early modern economic culture, local institutions and the economic crisis of the 1690s provides a particularly useful bridge between the world I am studying and the later crisis environment conventionally associated with England’s financial transformation (Waddell, 2012, 2023).
Frank Trentmann’s work on trade, political economy and the relationship between material life, institutions and politics gives the project a broader framework. The point is not to treat “the economy” as a machine detached from law, politics and social organisation, but to ask how commercial practices and institutional power evolve together.
The location is equally important.
This is a London project whose principal archives are in London. The London Archives, company archives, the Institute of Historical Research and The National Archives place an unusually dense concentration of relevant material within practical reach. The Merchant Taylors’ archive is now available through The London Archives; ROLLCO provides a searchable membership infrastructure for several livery companies; and the National Archives’ Exchequer records supply the royal administrative side of the same economy.
That does not make archival research easy.
It makes difficult research possible.
A note on the archive’s current names
One small but important practical point: the institution long known as the London Metropolitan Archives was renamed The London Archives in August 2024. My proposal used the older title in several places because that is how much of the scholarly literature and older cataloguing refers to it. For current research planning, booking and citation of the institution itself, I will use the current name.
This sounds trivial, but archival research accumulates these details. Institutional names change, catalogues migrate, series are re-described, online resources move, and the historian has to keep the documentary map current while reading material that may itself be six centuries old.
The infrastructure of historical research has a history too.
Why economic history?
Part of the attraction of economic history is that it makes it difficult to hide behind abstraction.
Economics can specify a commitment problem. History can ask what people actually did about it.
Economics can model information asymmetry. An archive may show that a creditor demanded two sureties, one surety, formal enrolment or nothing at all.
Economics can describe liquidity constraints. Monetary history can identify contraction in specie. A court roll can show what happened when a particular obligation reached maturity.
Economics can predict that stronger enforcement should increase the value of a promise. Legal history can reveal whether the relevant remedy existed. Institutional history can ask whether merchants actually used it.
That combination is powerful when neither discipline is allowed to dominate the evidence.
I am not attempting to show that medieval London secretly invented modern finance.
Nor am I interested in finding medieval analogies for every contemporary financial technology. A recognisance is not a smart contract. A guild register is not a blockchain. Historical explanation deteriorates quickly when analogy replaces analysis.
The contemporary relevance is more fundamental.
Every financial system depends on mechanisms that make promises transferable, enforceable or sufficiently credible that people will act upon them. Banks solve some of those problems. Courts solve some. Collateral, reputation, networks, guarantees, clearing arrangements and state credibility solve others.
Modern financial systems have not abolished the institutional problem.
They have layered large organisations on top of it.
Studying a commercial society in which those mechanisms remain unusually visible can reveal parts of finance that later institutional complexity tends to conceal.
A banking system can make trust look automatic.
It never is.
What the first year should produce
The first phase is source construction.
That means fixing the archival series, building the coding framework, piloting the transaction dataset and determining which periods permit genuinely comparable observation. The initial concentration will be city records and the Plea and Memoranda Rolls, alongside livery-company material that can provide an independent institutional perspective.
The data structure will have to develop with the sources rather than against them.
Categories that look beautifully tidy before archival work may prove historically meaningless. A field that seems indispensable may turn out to be absent from most documents. A distinction that appears minor at first may prove essential once the records are read systematically.
The first-year objective is therefore not to maximise the number of observations.
It is to make every observation intelligible.
The project should eventually generate more than a conventional narrative thesis. A properly documented transaction-level dataset, a transparent coding protocol, concordances across selected archival series, and visualisations of changes in instruments, sureties, forums and outcomes would make the underlying evidentiary architecture reusable.
That matters because one of the persistent problems in historical work is that the argument survives but the research machinery disappears. I want the opposite: a thesis whose claims can be inspected because the evidentiary structure is explicit.
What I hope this changes
If the project works, its contribution should not be “medieval people used credit.” We already know that.
The more substantial contribution would be to show how the composition of credible commitment changed under different monetary regimes, and to connect those micro-level institutional changes to the later history of English finance without reducing them to a rehearsal for 1694.
The medieval monetary literature tells us a great deal about scarcity.
The early modern financial-revolution literature tells us a great deal about later institutional transformation.
The space between them is where I want to work.
That means asking whether London developed durable solutions to commitment, information and enforcement problems during repeated monetary crises; whether those solutions were generated by the Crown, the city, companies, merchant networks or interactions among them; and whether the institutional repertoire that emerges by the sixteenth century helps us understand the later capacity of London to absorb much larger forms of public and private credit.
The answer may be yes in some areas and no in others.
That is exactly why the archive matters.
From monetary metal to institutional trust
The Bank of England did not fall from the sky in 1694.
Neither, however, was it sitting fully formed inside a fifteenth-century guildhall waiting for somebody to notice it.
Between those caricatures lies the more interesting history.
For more than two centuries before England’s celebrated Financial Revolution, London’s merchants operated through plague, war, bullion shortages, political instability, shifting trade patterns and deliberate degradation of the coinage. Commerce did not survive because those problems were trivial. It survived because economic actors possessed mechanisms for shifting settlement through time, evaluating counterparties, guaranteeing obligations, recording claims and enforcing promises.
Those mechanisms changed.
Some probably strengthened. Some disappeared. Some protected insiders at the expense of outsiders. Some may have emerged temporarily under pressure. Others may have become part of London’s durable institutional repertoire.
The purpose of this project is to find out which.
That requires moving between coins and contracts, between aggregate monetary conditions and individual disputes, between royal policy and merchant response, and between formal law and institutions operating partly outside the Crown’s machinery.
Most of all, it requires treating credit as something more than the absence of cash.
Credit is a claim about the future.
A functioning financial system is an institutional arrangement that persuades enough people that such claims are worth accepting.
London was doing that long before it had a central bank.
The interesting question is how.
References
Allen, M. (2012). Mints and money in medieval England. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139057394
Bolton, J. L. (2012). Money in the medieval English economy, 973–1489. Manchester University Press. https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719050404/
Carruthers, B. G. (1996). City of capital: Politics and markets in the English financial revolution. Princeton University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7t8rm
Davies, M. (Ed.). (2000). The Merchant Taylors’ Company of London: Court minutes, 1486–1493. Richard III and Yorkist History Trust in association with Paul Watkins. https://yorkisthistorytrust.org/publications/
Davies, M., & Saunders, A. (2004). The history of the Merchant Taylors’ Company. Maney. https://www.routledge.com/The-History-of-the-Merchant-Taylors-Company/Davies/p/book/9781902653990
Dickson, P. G. M. (1967). The financial revolution in England: A study in the development of public credit, 1688–1756. Macmillan. https://search.worldcat.org/title/253294
Greif, A. (2006). Institutions and the path to the modern economy: Lessons from medieval trade. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791307
Mayhew, N. J. (1995). Population, money supply, and the velocity of circulation in England, 1300–1700. The Economic History Review, 48(2), 238–257. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1995.tb01417.x
Muldrew, C. (1998). The economy of obligation: The culture of credit and social relations in early modern England. Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26879-5
Munro, J. H. (1983). Bullion flows and monetary contraction in late-medieval England and the Low Countries. In J. F. Richards (Ed.), Precious metals in the later medieval and early modern worlds (pp. 97–158). Carolina Academic Press.
Murphy, A. L. (2009). The origins of English financial markets: Investment and speculation before the South Sea Bubble. Cambridge University Press.
Nightingale, P. (1995). A medieval mercantile community: The Grocers’ Company and the politics and trade of London, 1000–1485. Yale University Press.
North, D. C. (1990). Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808678
Ogilvie, S. (2019). The European guilds: An economic analysis. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691137544.001.0001
Spufford, P. (1988). Money and its use in medieval Europe. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511583544
Waddell, B. (2012). God, duty and community in English economic life, 1660–1720. Boydell Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781782040385
Waddell, B. (2023). The economic crisis of the 1690s in England. The Historical Journal, 66(2), 281–302. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X22000309
Wennerlind, C. (2011). Casualties of credit: The English financial revolution, 1620–1720. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674062665
Project and archive links
-
Birkbeck 2026–27 term dates: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/about-us/term-dates
-
Professor Matthew Davies, Birkbeck: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/9007462
-
Dr Brodie Waddell, Birkbeck: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/8004317/brodie-waddell
-
Professor Frank Trentmann, Birkbeck: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/8009279/frank-trentmann
-
The London Archives: https://www.thelondonarchives.org/
-
Merchant Taylors’ Company archives: https://www.merchant-taylors.co.uk/about
-
Records of London’s Livery Companies Online (ROLLCO): https://www.londonroll.org/
-
The National Archives, medieval Exchequer overview: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/medieval-political-history/