Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), p. 311

Any student of the medieval and early-modern history of England knows full well the great importance of wool in its economy and society. From at least the eleventh to the mid-fifteenth century, it provided England’s overwhelmingly dominant export, accounting for at least ninety per cent of total export revenues; and from then until the mid seventeenth century it accounted for the very same proportion of export revenues in the form of manufactured woollen (and worsted) cloths. Scholars are therefore highly indebted to the List and Index Society, and especially to the three editors named above, for the publication – in both the original Latin and in English translation – of 203 wool contracts, arranged in chronological order, from 1231 to 1325, taken from TNA’s Exchequer Memoranda Rolls (E 159, E 368) and also from the Plea Rolls (E 13) and Close Rolls (C 54). The exceptionally important Appendix I (pp.176–219) presents the first complete publication of the well-known ‘Exchequer Schedule’ of 1294 (E 101/126/7), when Edward I sequestered the assets of foreign merchants during his war with France. It contains the submissions of the twelve leading Italian mercantile companies involved in the English wool trade, providing another 220 implicit wool contracts (contained within document nos. 204–16: one for each firm, plus the cover document), presented in full detail. Appendix II presents some dozen miscellaneous documents (nos. 217–228) on wool sales that have been selected from various other archival sources in TNA.

The bulk of the documents, those in the main section, are entitled ‘advance contracts for the sale of wool’, though not all the documents in this collection are in fact such contracts. The actual ‘advance contracts’ are chiefly in the form of recognizances of debt by which the English wool sellers acknowledge having received specific sums of money, in English sterling, for the future delivery of specified quantities of wool, at specific dates. It is possible, as the editors admit, that some of these contracts were drawn up to disguise usurious and thus forbidden loans; but most certainly appear to be genuine contracts for future deliveries of wool to a wide variety of firms whose importance in the English wool-export trade cannot be doubted. Such contracts will undoubtedly prove to be of very great interest (and perhaps astonishment) to financial historians, for most them would not know that such supposedly modern financial instruments were so used as early as the thirteenth century. Whether the Italian merchant firms had purchased the wools at a cash discount for future delivery up to twenty years later, or whether they had made loan transactions with the wool as the collateral, the ‘implied rates of interest’, according to the editors, ‘have been calculated as between 10 and 40 per cent with the median rates being between 18 and 22 per cent per year’.

For readers of this journal, however, the more important issues are the voluminous data on the wool sales themselves: the identities of the buyers and sellers, and the prices (though discounted) of a wide variety of wools, some of which were then the very finest that Europe had produced, and, as such, an absolute requisite for the production of the highest quality luxury woollen broadcloths. These 203 contracts (all of which this reviewer read) contain the names of 101 lay producers and 114 monastic producers, listed in the introductory information that the editors supplied. In terms of volumes of wool sold, however, the balance was far more highly skewed towards the latter. Thus, while the lay growers sold, over this 95-year period, a total of only 983.827 sacks (each of 364lb weight, or 26 stones of 14 lb), religious orders had contracted to sell 4600.827 sacks, along with ten whole annual crops, and other wools worth £571 6s. 8d. (sold by the Templars). Of these orders, the Cistercians – not surprisingly – were by far the most important in selling about 2900 sacks in 73 contracts. The others were: the Cluniacs with 963 sacks in eight contracts; the Benedictines with 403 sacks and one crop in seven contracts; the Augustinians with 372 sacks in 13 contracts, and the Premonstratensians with five sacks and two whole crops in three contracts.

Of equal interest is the identity and rank order of the buyers. English and other northern European merchants constituted a very distinct minority: the English accounted for only 1128.231 sacks and two crops (38 contracts); the Flemish, even more surprisingly, for only 18 sacks (in three contracts); the northern French, for only 50.462 sacks (five contracts); and the Germans, for only one sack and one crop (in two contracts). Thus the bulk went to southern merchants, of which the French Cahorsins (major medieval bankers) accounted for 600 sacks and one crop (20 contracts). The Italian merchants, chiefly from Lucca and Florence, then enjoying their heyday in both the English wool trade and English finances, purchased the largest single share: almost 4000 sacks and six whole crops in 150 contracts. Those from Lucca accounted for 1990 sacks and two whole crops, in 97 contracts. The most important by far were the Riccardi, with 1400 sacks (87 contracts). They were followed by the Gualtieri, with 450 sacks (five contracts); the Bettori, with 31 sacks (one contract); the Bellardi, with 20 sacks (two contracts); and the Gotele, with two whole crops. Florentine merchant-banking houses accounted for even more: 2000 sacks and four whole crops, in 47 contracts. That included: the Frescobaldi, with 1258.519 sacks (28 contracts) and the above-mentioned Templar wools; the Cerchi with 249 sacks (two contracts); the Mozzi with 229 sacks (two contracts); the Pulci-Rimbertini with 69 sacks (three contracts); the Spini with 50 sacks (one contract); the Falconieri with 38.154 sacks (four contracts); the Bardi with 13 sacks (five contracts); and the Peruzzi, even more surprisingly, with only 8 sacks (one contract).

As the editors are quick to point out, the aggregate total of the wool in these advance sales contracts represents only a very small percentage of total exports over this long period. Indeed, the seeming preponderance of the religious orders may reflect the fact that most of them were asset rich (in lands and livestock) but cash poor, and thus in greater need than most lay estates of such liquid funds, chiefly of course from Italian merchant-bankers. That very, very few Flemish wool merchants were also bankers may also explain their minimal role in these ‘advance contracts’.

The wealth of data in these documents cries out for tabulation in spreadsheets, which, I hope, the editors will provide in their forthcoming book, The English wool market, c.1250–1350 (CUP). It would be fascinating to see, for both sellers and buyers, in chronological order, the exact quantities of wool in each of these transactions, the institutional and geographic location of the wools so produced, the names and locations of the buyers, the grades of wool, and the related prices, even if discounted, compared with those in other wool price schedules from this era.

I have two minor criticisms about an otherwise exceptionally valuable publication. First, the editors should have taken care to inform the readers that, while some of the English and Welsh wools were indeed the finest ever produced, some were not, because England, especially then, produced a very wide variety of wools, some of which were mediocre in quality. Furthermore, in this period both the Low Countries and Italy also produced a very wide variety of woollen cloths, and neither region came to specialize in very high quality, costly woollens, requiring uniquely, as noted earlier, the highest grades of English wools (from the Welsh Marches, the Cotswolds, and Lincolnshire) until after the 1330s, i.e., after the end of this series of documents, by which time, furthermore, the Cistercians and other monasteries had largely ceased to play a major role in the English wool export trade.

The other and very minor criticism is that the editors should also have informed the reader that wools were priced both in pounds sterling and more commonly in marks. The latter, whose abbreviation was simply m. (not explained in the text), was worth two-thirds of a pound sterling: i.e. 13s. 4d. Seasoned scholars already know that – but probably not many graduate students who are just beginning their doctoral research.