Medieval Merchants and Money
Essays in Honour of James L. Bolton
Matthew Davies (Editor), Martin Allen (Editor)
Series: IHR Conference Series
Published in association with: Institute of Historical Research
This volume contains selected essays in celebration of the scholarship of the medieval historian Professor James L. Bolton. The essays address a number of different questions in medieval economic and social history, as the volume looks at the activities of merchants, their trade, legal interactions and identities, and on the importance of money and credit in the rural and urban economies. Other essays look more widely at patterns of immigration to London, trade and royal policy, and the role that merchants played in the Hundred Years War.
“An excellent collection, highly relevant to London history and also containing papers that have a significant contribution to make to England’s economic history more generally. As always with volumes of essays, it is difficult to do justice in a review to all the authors and their research, but it is not difficult to say that this is an extremely interesting group of essays, which are without exception clearly written and argued and which demonstrate that research into English mercantile history is flourishing and looks set to continue.”-The London Journal
The London Journal
“A wealth of important new information, which collectively provides a new vision of the fifteenth-century English economy.”
–Economic History Review
Contents
Preface
I. London merchants: companies, identities and culture
1 Negotiating merchant identities: the Stockfishmongers and London’s companies merging and dividing, c.1450–1550
Justin Colson
2 ‘Writying, making and engrocyng’: clerks, guilds and identity in late medieval London
Matthew Davies
3 What did medieval London merchants read?
Caroline M. Barron
4 ‘For quicke and deade memorie masses’: merchant piety in late medieval London
Christian Steer
II. Warfare, trade and mobility
5 Fighting merchants
Sam Gibbs and Adrian R. Bell
- London and its merchants in the Italian archives, 1380–1530
F. Guidi-Bruscoli
7 Settled or fleeting? London’s medieval immigrant community revisited
Jessica Lutkin
III. Merchants and the English crown
8 East coast ports and the Iceland trade, 1483–5 (1489): protection and compensation
Anne F. Sutton
9 Royal servants and city fathers: the double lives of London goldsmiths at the court of Henry VII
S. P. Harper
IV. Money and mints
10 Medieval merchants and the English mints and exchanges, 973–1489
Martin Allen
11 The prosecution of counterfeiting in Lancastrian England
Hannes Kleineke
V. Markets, credit and the rural economy
- The economic impact of clothmaking on rural society, 1300–1550
John Oldland
13 Dealing in crisis: external credit and the early fourteenth-century English village
Phillipp R. Schofield
14 Market courts and lex mercatoria in late medieval England
James Davis
VI. Merchants and the law
15 Merchants and their use of the action of account in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century England
Paul Brand
16 ‘According to the law of merchants and the custom of the city of London’: Burton v. Davy (1436) and the negotiability of credit instruments in medieval England
Tony Moore
Bibliography of the published works of James L. Bolton
PDF: 9781909646735
EPUB: 9781909646353
Hardback: 9781909646162 / 386 pages / 245mm x 163mm
Matthew Davies (Editor)
Martin Allen (Editor)
“An excellent collection, highly relevant to London history and also containing papers that have a significant contribution to make to England’s economic history more generally. As always with volumes of essays, it is difficult to do justice in a review to all the authors and their research, but it is not difficult to say that this is an extremely interesting group of essays, which are without exception clearly written and argued and which demonstrate that research into English mercantile history is flourishing and looks set to continue.”-The London Journal
The London Journal
“A wealth of important new information, which collectively provides a new vision of the fifteenth-century English economy.”
–Economic History Review
Subject: History, Medieval History
BISAC codes: HIS037010
Thema codes: N
Keywords: Economic history, English Mints., London, Markets, Medieval Guilds, Medieval Merchants, Trade
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