The sixteen articles in this collection analyse the contribution made by overseas trade, and the wealth in coin which it created, to the development of the English economy and locate this in an European-wide setting. In time, they range from the late Anglo-Saxon period up to the advent of the Tudors. The papers include general surveys of the importance of coinage and credit in the rise and decline of a market economy, and of the way that credit functioned in a society that lacked reliable supplies of bullion and which was also subject to the scourges of warfare and devastating disease. They illustrate, too, how from the tenth century the English crown used its control and exploitation of the coinage as part of a sophisticated fiscal system which helped create the precocious power of the English state. The author further shows how the wool trade altered the geographical pattern of wealth and enriched peasants, landowners and merchants, while the competing interests involved in the trade also cause political conflicts in Parliament and in the government of London during the period when London was establishing itself as the political capital and the financial centre of the kingdom.
Biography
Pamela Nightingale is a member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford, UK.
’It is a great privilege to review a collection of Nightingale’s collected articles, for she is one of the most wide-ranging historians now working in Britain.... this is medieval economic history at its superb best.’ Economic History Review ’Pamela Nightingale has long made a reputation as one of the leading economic historians of medieval England, with an enviably long chronological range. It is therefore a great service to have gathered here in one volume seventeen of her articles ... we have here a valuable and sparkling collection, one which no serious student of medieval England can aff ord to ignore.’ English Historical Review
