Money Lending on the Periphery of London, 1300–1600

1988 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie K. McIntosh
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Local People ◽  
Regional Economies ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Short Supply ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The City

Money lending was an essential part of the local and regional economies of England during the later medieval and Tudor periods. Cash was required for purchases of goods, animals, or land, payment of rents and taxes, and the wages of hired workers. People who lacked money to cover these expenses between 1300 and 1600 commonly resorted to borrowing. Borrowing thus might be undertaken for purposes of either consumption or investment. Further, during much of the later medieval period and occasionally during the Tudor years specie was in short supply. Even a man of some wealth might find himself without sufficient currency on hand to cover his immediate needs. In nearly all cases late medieval and Tudor loans were for short terms, for periods ranging from a few weeks to six months. Interest was normally charged on local loans, although the amount was concealed due to the Church's prohibition of usury.Money lending was particularly important within commercialized areas—the major cities and their economic hinterlands. The region lying within a radius of about twenty miles from London formed one of the most thoroughly commercialized parts of the country. By the fourteenth century people living on the periphery of the capital were deeply involved in furnishing consumer goods to London. Agriculture among middling and larger tenants focused upon market sale; craftsmen sometimes sold to citizens as well as to their own neighbors. Late medieval London was surrounded by a ring of at least thirty-two market towns located within twenty miles of the capital. These markets served to channel grain, animals, fuel, and craft items into the city while also functioning as centers of trade for their own areas. In the market communities around London the extent of trade was unusually large and the economic sophistication of local people unusually high. Cash was the medium of accounting for all transactions and the medium of exchange for the great majority of them. It is not surprising that money lending played an especially significant role in this area.

scholarly journals ‘On behalf of the city’: wax and urban diplomacy in the late medieval Baltic and North Sea

Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Mark Whelan
Keyword(s):  
North Sea ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Capital ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Civic Leaders ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban Leaders ◽  
North Western

Abstract Focusing on the largely unpublished ‘city accounts’ (‘Stadsrekeningen’) of Bruges, this article examines the city's giving of prestigious Baltic beeswax to their lords, the Valois and (later) Habsburg dukes of Burgundy. It sheds new light on urban government by analysing how civic leaders across north-western Europe used the apiary product to manage often fraught relationships with their rulers and reinforce their identities as trading centres or outposts of international repute. More broadly, the gifting of Baltic beeswax points to the political and diplomatic prestige associated with the trade and display of the commodity in the later medieval period and the desire of urban leaders and communities to extract symbolic and political capital from its exchange.

scholarly journals Re-examining Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum and the “Ethiopian” embassy to Europe of 1306

2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-515
Author(s):  
Verena Krebs
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Horn Of Africa ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Military Aid ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
Legenda Aurea

AbstractA widely reported story in the historiography on medieval Ethiopia relates how, in the year 1306, an “Ethiopian” embassy visited the court of Pope Clement V in Avignon and offered military aid in the fight against Islam to Latin Christianity. This article re-examines the source – Jacopo Filippo Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum – thought to document an episode of one of the earliest European–African Christian contacts. It investigates Foresti's own sources, their historiographical transmission history, and the feasibility of relating it to the socio-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa in the early fourteenth century, concluding that Foresti's information was based on Latin Christian texts, such as the Legenda Aurea and the myth of Prester John, only. The ‘Ethiopian’ embassy of 1306 is thus not borne out by sources and should be dismissed in scholarship, resetting the timeline of official Ethiopian–Latin Christian contacts in the late medieval period.

The Discovery of an Early Bearing-Dial

1953 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl V. Sølver
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The North ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
North Western

It has hitherto been generally presumed that the division of the horizon into thirty-two points was a development of the late medieval period. Such a division, it has been said, was impossible in the pre-compass era. ‘It is questionable whether even so many as sixteen directions could have been picked out and followed at sea so long as Sun and star, however intimately known, were the only guides’, one eminent authority has declared; ‘Even the sailors in the north-western waters had only four names until a comparatively late date.’ Chaucer's reference in his Treatise on the Astrolabe to the thirty-two ‘partiez’ of the ‘orisonte’ has for long been quoted as the earliest evidence on the subject. The Konungs Skuggsjà, a thirteenth-century Norwegian work, however, refers to the Sun revolving through eight œttir; and the fourteenthcentury Icelandic Rímbegla talks of sixteen points or directions. An important discovery by the distinguished Danish archaeologist, Dr. C. L. Vebæk, in the summer of 1951, brings a new light to the whole problem and makes the earlier held view scarcely tenable. Vebæk was then working on the site of the Benedictine nunnery (mentioned by Îvar Bárdarson in the mid-fourteenth century) which stands on the site of a still older Norse homestead on the Siglufjörd, in southern Greenland. Buried in a heap of rubbish under the floor in one of the living-rooms, together with a number of broken tools of wood and iron (some of them with the owner's name inscribed on them in runes) was a remarkable fragment of carved oak which evidently once formed part of a bearingdial. This was a damaged oaken disk which, according to the archaeologists, dates back to about the year 1200.

Ruin and Reality

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-40
Author(s):  
James A. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Modern State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Political Values ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
Papal States ◽  
The City

This chapter discusses the structures and developments that paved the way for the transformation of the city of Rome in the late medieval period. It examines the Roman commune's political history, a history culminating in the mid-fourteenth-century revolution of Cola di Rienzo. In the wake of that event, Roman social and political values emerge with particular clarity, providing a glimpse of the cultural context within which the novel strategies of the late fourteenth-century ruling group emerged. Analysis of it elucidates the crossroads at which Roman politics had arrived by the late 1350s, clarifying the precise nature of the first of the two major challenges facing the city's ruling elite: the crisis of legitimacy. The chapter then considers the nature of humanist ideas about Rome and their enduring influence on subsequent studies of Rome, the Renaissance, and the rise of the modern state, the latter being a field in which the Papal States now figure prominently.

London Books and London Readers

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Boffey
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
William Caxton ◽  
National Significance ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

This article examines the city of London—its history, topography, governance, people—as a most fruitful subject of books in the late medieval period. It considers a poem that praises London’s “renown, riches and royalte” as an example of metropolitan textual production and transmission during the period. It also explores some of the contexts in which manuscript and print were brought together, or conversely kept apart, in the decades which immediately followed the introduction of printing to England by William Caxton in c.1476. In addition, it looks at London readers as a significant audience for texts of wider national significance, the interpenetration of different forms of book production in London at the start of the sixteenth century, and three manuscripts: the two separate volumes of theNew cronyclesplus the Guildhall manuscript of theGreat Chronicle.

Merchant Taylors of London’s shift to business English: New insights on the languages of record in their Master and Wardens’ Accounts

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
José Miguel Alcolado Carnicero
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Written Communication ◽  
Business English ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Medieval Period

AbstractFrench and Latin used to be the two main languages of record in the Merchant Taylors, as well as other London livery companies, as late as the fifteenth century, at least. From the fourteenth century onwards, English was becoming more and more present in this guild’s business accounts, until it replaced both Romance languages as their new official medium of written communication. Seen the inconsistent dates of adoption of English in the Merchant Taylors’ Master and Wardens’ Accounts suggested in the literature, this article applies two different approaches to language shift in the late medieval period in order to analyse and illustrate when exactly the whole Company is supposed to have substituted French and Latin for English forever. As the search of that permanent and communal shift leads to the necessary consultation of financial manuscripts kept as late as the seventeenth century, it is concluded that the construction of a unitary framework for the study of the different language shifts in the London livery companies at different periods would yield more comprehensive results.

scholarly journals The Fortifications of Chalcis (Evripos/Negreponte/Egriboz), Greece

X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stavros Mamaloukos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Greek City ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
Byzantine Period ◽  
The City ◽  
Steep Hill

The aim of this paper is the study of the now destroyed fortifications of the Greek city of Chalcis (Evripos / Negreponte / Egriboz). Having been an important urban centre during the Early and Middle Byzantine Period, Chalcis was occupied by the Latins after the capture of Constantinople in 1204 and became a significant trade centre of Venice. By the end of the fourteenth century, the city became a Venetian holding. In 1470 the Ottomans captured the city after a brief siege. In 1688 the city was unsuccessfully besieged by the Venetians. And in 1833 it was annexed by the Greek State. In the end of the nineteenth century the fortifications of Chalcis were almost completely demolished during an attempt to reorganize and modernize the city. The fortified medieval city of Chalcis, the Kastro, had the shape of a long, irregular pentagon with maximum dimensions 400 x 700 m. It was surrounded on three sides, namely the north, west and south, by sea. Along its two other sides, the northeast and the southeast, there was a dry moat. Its fortifications had three gates, one on Euripus bridge and two on the land wall, through which the city was connected with Boeotia and Euboea, respectively. From the study of the fortifications, based on their depictions in old engravings and photographs as well as on some poor and still visible remnants, it appears that until their demolition the city walls retained to a large extent their late medieval form, although they had undergone significant interventions by the Ottomans, mainly on the eve, and just after the siege of 1688. The only surviving part of the city’s defences, the fort of Karababa, built on the steep hill of the Boeotian coast, can be dated to this period.

The mid-fourteenth century capital of Mali

1973 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. O. Hunwick
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
The South ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
River Niger

For over a century scholars have been attempting to locate the area and, if possible, the actual site of the capital of the Mali empire in its period of greatness. Since the 1920S attention has been focused on an area near the Sankararni river, a tributary entering the Niger from the south, upstream from Bamako. Over recent years a Polish-Guinean archaeological expedition has been digging a site there, but with inconclusive results so far.A close reading of the few descriptions we have of the capital of Mali, and in particular of the route taken by Ibn Battūta, who visited the capital in 1352, suggests that the city lay on the left bank of the river Niger somewhere between Segu and Bamako. This is in fact a ‘logical] site for the capital of an empire whose tributaries lay mainly in the savannah and Sahel belts, and in whose armies cavalry played a significant role. For this reason, and a number of others, the recent hypothesis of Claude Meillassoux, suggesting a location for the capital south of the R. Falémé (and perhaps also of the R. Gambia), seems doubtful. The proper name for the capital is also discussed.

Past Verses Present; Metamorphosis in Different Spheres of Guwahati: A Study of Srutimala Duara’s Mindprints of Guwahati

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Ankita Pandey
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Areca Nut ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
River Bank ◽  
North East India ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Indian State ◽  
The City ◽  
Beautiful City

Guwahati derives its name from the Assamese word “Guwa” means areca nut and “Haat” means market. However, the modern Guwahati had been known as the ancient Pragjyotishpura and was the capital of Assam under the Kamrupa kingdom. A beautiful city Guwahati is situated on the south bank of the river Bramhaputra. Moreover, It is known as the largest city in the Indian state of Assam and also the largest metropolis in North East India. It has also its importance as the gateway to the North- East India. Assamese and English are the spoken languages in Guwahati.  In 1667, the Mogul forces were defeated in the battle by the Ahom forces commanded by Lachut Barphukan. Thus, in a sense Guwahati became the bone of contention among the Ahoms, Kochas and the Moguls during the medieval period.  Guwahati the administrative headquarters of Lower Assam with a viceroy or Barbhukan was made by the Ahom king.  Since 1972 it has been the capital of Assam. The present paper will discuss the changes happened in Guwahati over the period of late 1970s till the present time. It will focus on the behavior of people, transformed temples, Panbazar of the city, river bank of Bramhaputra, old Fancy Bazaar, chaotic ways, festivals and seasons including a fifth man made season etc. It will also deal how over the years a city endowed with nature’s gifts and scenic views, has been changing as “a dirty city”. Furthermore, it will also present the insurgencies that have barged into the city. The occurrence of changes will be discussed through the perspective and point of view of Srutimala Duara as presented in her book Mindprints of Guwahati.

Contesting the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian D. Liddy
Keyword(s):  
Urban Politics ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Town Government ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City

The political narrative of late medieval English towns is often reduced to the story of the gradual intensification of oligarchy, in which power was exercised and projected by an ever smaller ruling group over an increasingly subservient urban population. This book takes its inspiration not from English historiography, but from a more dynamic continental scholarship on towns in the southern Low Countries, Germany, and France. Its premise is that scholarly debate about urban oligarchy has obscured contemporary debate about urban citizenship. It identifies from the records of English towns a tradition of urban citizenship, which did not draw upon the intellectual legacy of classical models of the ‘citizen’. This was a vernacular citizenship, which was not peculiar to England, but which was present elsewhere in late medieval Europe. It was a citizenship that was defined and created through action. There were multiple, and divergent, ideas about citizenship, which encouraged townspeople to make demands, to assert rights, and to resist authority. This book exploits the rich archival sources of the five major towns in England—Bristol, Coventry, London, Norwich, and York—in order to present a new picture of town government and urban politics over three centuries. The power of urban governors was much more precarious than historians have imagined. Urban oligarchy could never prevail—whether ideologically or in practice—when there was never a single, fixed meaning of the citizen.

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