Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 2 (2018), p. 298

This book emerged out of a lively, exciting and stimulating international symposium on land and credit in the medieval and early modern countryside, held at Selwyn College, Cambridge, in 2015. Not all the authors here gave papers: the collection has benefited from a number of additional contributions, and an afterword by Craig Muldrew. The result is an engaging and illuminating set of comparisons of land-based credit and its development across Europe during the periods under review.

The introduction by Briggs and Zuijderduijn provides an excellent overview of the main threads running through the collection, including a discussion of the contract types that were available in pre-modern Europe, all of which were derived from Roman law. The fiducia, where the creditor had ownership but the debtor retained possession (the more attractive contract for lenders), and the hypotheca, in which the creditor had a possessory interest only (the preferred contract for borrowers), were the most common, although there was regional variation. Moreover, the use of the hypotheca expanded from the late Middle Ages to become the most usual type of contract across north-west mainland Europe by the early modern period.

Credit could be extended on the security of goods, livestock and people, but land offered the strongest form of protection for creditors; as a result, it could support larger amounts of borrowing. The instruments varied however. The annuity was envisaged at the outset as a long-term arrangement. In the Low Countries, renten could be sold for the life of the buyer or as perpetual annuities, in which the duty to pay passed to the heir; the latter increased in popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The mortgage on the other hand, at least in England, often began its life as a short-term instrument of between one and five years that was then rolled over for as long as the arrangement was mutually acceptable. This may in part have been a function of the fact that the mortgage market was essentially localized, apart from a few of the largest loans.

The collection reveals the impact of a number of factors that affected the development of land-based credit in the medieval and early modern countryside. On the one hand, the use of land as collateral increased as mortgage instruments and law became more debtor-friendly, including the right to redeem. In Gayton’s study of copyhold mortgages on Hampshire manors in the seventeenth century evolving attitudes to usury played an important part, despite little correlation between the statutory interest rate and borrowing, while Wedd’s study of the middling yeoman and gentry in Kent ties changes in the use of the mortgage to the growing availability of the right to redeem during the seventeenth century. In De Luca and Lorenzini’s study of mortgage credit in central northern Italy, the interest of the church in regulating and reinforcing the use of the census consig nativus, through which it was possible to circumvent usury restrictions by using a ‘sale and lease’ transaction, led to the instrument becoming widely used to support infrastructure projects in rural municipalities, as well as for the expansion of manufacturing and trade.

But shifts in the use of the land-based credit were affected by economic and social factors as well as legal changes, and were not always linear. The growth in the annuity market in rural Brabant in the sixteenth century, for example, was more closely correlated with the exceptional growth of Antwerp, and urban demand for land from commercial buyers. On the other hand, in Alsace in north-eastern France, new groups of creditors from the liberal professions, who were interested in neither the payment of interest in produce, nor the acquisition of land, preferred additional guarantors from the 1760s; as a result, the use of land as security fell away.

The collection provides a welcome reassessment of a number of key themes in the historiography of land and credit. In line with recent revisions of small farm productivity, the mortgage takes on a more positive role in the economy. Although there were always cases of default, the mortgage does not appear in to have been used primarily as a crisis instrument, nor as a method of land grabbing (but see Schraer’s chapter on the Jews of late medieval Aragon). Few debtors in southern Holland lost their property through foreclosure, for example, because decisions on default had to be made by local judges, who saw it as a measure of last resort. Stripping insolvent debtors of their land was neither automatic nor inevitable in central northern Italy either, although retaining debtors on mortgaged land had its benefits for creditors. The collection also offers some welcome nuancing of the New Institutional Economics’ position on property rights. Despite a lively credit market, the use of mortgages was less common in late medieval England than in Flanders, where the system of property rights was strong. But in Onacker’s study of the Campine area of the Low Countries it was the influence of community structures as much as the strength of property rights that affected the take-up of credit. Rather than operating as a motor of growth, mortgaging appears instead as a means to stabilize community life. The mortgaging of land also formed part of wider household strategies to secure landholding for the future.

This collection is a must-read volume for anyone interested in land-based credit, and not just because of its wide-ranging contents. It suggests that to understand fully the development of the mortgage we have to consider the perspective of the debtor as well as the creditor, for whom the increased flexibility of land-based credit was a real boon. This means we have to examine land-based credit through the lens of the family as much as the economy: mortgages allowed landholders to negotiate current liabilities and preserve their patrimony. In addition, it seems that the key to economic growth is not to be found in land-based credit alone; for that we have to look to the wider availability of a variety of credit forms.