Land and Credit

This volume investigates the use of mortgages in the European countryside between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. A mortgage allowed a loan to be secured with land or other property, and the practice has been linked to the transformation of the agrarian economy that paved the way for modern economic growth. Historians have viewed the mortgage both positively and negatively: on the one hand, it provided borrowers with opportunities for investment in agriculture; but equally, it exposed them to the risk of losing their mortgaged property. The case studies presented in this volume reveal the variety of forms that the mortgage took, and show how an intricate balance was struck between the interests of the borrower looking for funds, and those of the lender looking for security. It is argued that the character of mortgage law, and the nature of rights in land in operation in any given the place and period, determined the degree to which mortgages were employed. Over time, developments in these factors allowed increasing numbers of peasants to use mortgages more freely, and with a decreasing risk of expropriation. This volume will be appealing to academics and researchers interested in financial history, rural credit and debt, and the economic history of agrarian communities.

Auteur

Chris Briggs, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval British Social and Economic History at the University of Cambridge, UK, and affiliated to Selwyn College, Cambridge. Dr Briggs is the author of a number of studies of credit and debt in the medieval economy, including Credit and village society in fourteenth century England (2009).

Jaco Zuijderduijn, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Economic History at Lund University, Sweden. He publishes widely on the financial history of the later Middle Ages, with a particular focus on how individuals made use of financial markets. He is the author of Medieval capital markets. Markets for 'renten', state formation and private investment in Holland (1300-1550) (2009).

Contenu
1 Introduction: mortgages and annuities in historical perspectiveChris Briggs and Jaco Zuijderduijn2 Mortgages and the English peasantry c.1250-c.1350Chris Briggs3 Mortgages raised by rural English copyhold tenants 1605-1735Juliet Gayton4 Mortgages and the Kentish yeoman in the seventeenth centuryImogen Wedd5 Why the equity of redemption?D.P. Waddilove6 Credit and land: the Jews of Zaragoza 1383-1400Michael Schraer7 Not only land: mortgage credit in central-northern Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesGiuseppe De Luca and Marcella Lorenzini8 Rural credit markets in eighteenth-century France: contracts, guarantees and landElise M. Dermineur9 The use of perpetual annuities in rural Brabant in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuriesMichael Limberger and Nicolas De Vijlder10 Proactive peasants? The role of annuities in a late medieval communal society: the Campine area, Low CountriesEline Van Onacker11 The other fundamental problem of exchange: mortgages, defaults, and debtor protection in sixteenth-century HollandJaco Zuijderduijn12 Afterword: mortgages as a mediation between kin and capitalCraig Muldrew