by Jack Lindsay
The merchant associations of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had nothing exclusively local about them. Burgesses of different towns worked side by side; the effect was of regional rather than urban groupings, which were still far from the exclusive, protectionist groupings of the fourteenth century. Trading regulations were not hampered by restrictive clauses and public authorities exercised no supervision. The men were left to carry on as long as they paid the fiscal dues levied by the territorial princes or lords with jurisdiction at the passage of bridges, along roads and rivers, or at markets. The only restrictions were economic: the various merchant associations, meeting at a market for buying and selling, opposed one another in strong competition. Each excluded members of other groups from any share in its affairs, though without ..ny legal title to do so. Down to the end of the twelfth century the number of towns with a strong mercantile basis was relatively small; only places with favourable geographical sites drew large numbers of merchants, and these places exerted much influence on secondary regions where the merchants, too few to act on their own, affiliated themselves to the hanse or guild of the main town. Merchants of Dixmude, Oudenbourg, Ardenbourg, and so on, sought admission to the hanse of Bruges. Town activities were more concerned with trade than with craft or industry; commodities like wine, grain and cloth were often produced in the country.
Travel over long distances was slow; but the speed at which news got about varied. The usual time for travelling from Rome to Canterbury was seven weeks, but urgent news could arrive in four. The story of Frederick Barbarossa’s death in Asia Minor took four months to reach Germany, but that of Richard I’s captivity in Austria reached England in as many weeks. Men travelled at an average speed of twenty miles a day, or possibly thirty, though if necessary they could speed up to fifty. There was considerable movement among pilgrims, merchants, churchmen going to synods and scholars to universities, crusaders, mercenaries, pedlars, and peasants seeking for land.[506] Ideas and cultural influences could thus be exchanged far more than one might think. The French chansons de geste were connected with the ambulatory public of the pilgrim centres and fairs, and show a close link between monks and jongleurs. The annals of a group of Anglo-Norman houses were based on annals that had come from the Rhine via Burgundy, and went back to the Easter tables of Bede; the annals of Margam on the Welsh border described King John’s condemnation by the court of Philip Augustus; Bury in 1181-2 had a six months’ visit from the Norwegian archbishop Eystein; the monks of Mont St Michel in Normandy were in close touch with those of Mont Sant’angelo on the east coast of Italy. Matthew Paris had detailed information about the Tartars; and the miracles of St Nicholas, of much importance in the history of ritual drama, came from the east via St Nicholas in Bari as far as Bec and Hildesheim — not only to churches with this patron saint, but to others along the road, like St Salvatore in Lucca (as we see from the portal).[507] Rulers took part in the exchanges. Manuel Comnenos sent Ptolemy’s Almagest to the king of Sicily; King Roger drew to Palermo men of learning from all lands. Peter of Blois was the friend of the rulers of both England and Sicily. The pilgrim routes also helped the diffusion northwards of Byzantine influences and the church-type of the Holy Sepulchre; Cluniac art spread into Burgundy, then into England, Galicia, Apulia and Palestine, but especially along the great road to St James at Compostella.[508]
At sea were the hazards of bad weather and piracy. Goscelin tells us of a man bringing Caen stone for Canterbury under William who ran into a storm. Even during his lifetime St Wulfstan rivalled St Nicholas as the saviour to whom sailors of the Bristol-Ireland passage appealed. Eustace the Monk was a famous pirate whom we shall later consider. We hear of sailors driven on to Lundy Island, which was held by the pirate William de Mareis, son of Geoffrey de Marisco, and used as a base for attacks on passing ships. Till the end of the eleventh century the line between trade and piracy, raids and war proper, was not clearly drawn. Gruffyd ap Cynan was a Welshman with Norse blood; in about 1087 he sailed to the Orkneys to gather a fleet of pirates for a descent on Wales to restore him to his kingdom. The fleet entered the Severn estuary and ravaged the church of St Gwynllyw, which looked out over the marshy flat near the mouth of the Usk. Other churches were raided: St David’s in 1080 and 1091. The second time the raiders came from the Isle of Man, ‘pagans from the isles’. This seems to have been the last pagan assault on a church in Wales.[509]
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The urbanizing and mercantile trends were inevitably linked with an expansion of the cash nexus, which undermined a great many medieval preconceptions and feudal institutions. An important aspect of the medieval world was precisely the way it functioned to a considerable extent without the intrusions of money, despite the continual drive to transmute service relations into money contracts. There was thus what we may call a pervading concreteness in human relations, which was in ceaseless conflict with the abstracting powers of money. Men normally made whole things, and made them with their hands; they carried through the whole of a process of work. Fragmentation of labour was little developed. Profits and rents were essentially extorted by sheer force; but at least this meant that there was nothing difficult to understand in what happened. In such a world the abstracting force of money, involving a mechanism that seemed to be outside human control, appeared as something hostile, uncanny, and insidious; its operation seemed to be based on cheats and tricks; profits could only result from some underhand theft. Hence a trader was liable to have something of the alien aura of the usurer or Jew, a man who made money unnaturally, by ‘breeding’.
The scriptural condemnation of Deuteronomy (xxiii 20-1) was taken by Jerome and medieval writers to apply to all Christians. It was argued by Peter Comester that the Jew was forbidden to engage in usury with his brother, but was allowed by God to lend to Christians to save them from temptation. Anyone indulging in usury, said the Lateran council of 1179, was unworthy of Christian burial. When Aristotle’s influence increased, his idea that money should not breed strengthened the prevailing view. To buy cheap and sell dear was a sin equal to usury. William of Rennes declared:
though business can scarcely be conducted without sin, merchants may receive a moderate profit to maintain themselves and families. As they work for all and perform a sort of common business by transporting merchandise back and forth between fairs, they should not be held to pay their own wages. From the merchandise itself they can accept a moderate profit which is regulated by the judgment of a good man, since the amount of profit permitted cannot be exactly determined in shillings, pounds, and pence.[510]
The church’s doctrine of the just price collided with the Roman law of sale (revived by the school of Bologna) that prices should be the result of free bargaining between seller and buyer, as long as there was no fraud. But lawyers took up a qualification in the code of Justinian — that the price agreed on for land should not be less than half of the just value — and applied it to all sales. Thus a compromise was found with the notion of the just price, which was interpreted simply as the current market price or as the decision of a judge or competent valuer. Everyone considered it fair and right to ask interest from an enemy, from infidels, heretics or Saracens, though not from Jews. And a way was found round the condemnation of selling dear and buying cheap; the canonist Rufinus said that all was well if the transaction was based on necessity rather than profit. The labour spent in transportation or improvement must be allowed for; profits were fair if not inordinate. Aquinas concluded that a trader’s profit should bring adequate repayment for services he had rendered, gain him a livelihood, and give him a surplus to be used in works of charity and grace; and if a debtor out of gratitude wanted to make a gift freely to his creditor, the law wasn’t broken. Slowly qualifications of this sort corroded all the church’s positions about the just price and about usury. The upper classes naturally felt that the only respectable money was that earned without labour and simply extorted by armed power; their attitudes thus merged with the people’s fear of
money as a strange alien compulsive force. ‘It is difficult among buyers and sellers not to fall into sin,’ said the canonist Histiensis. There was a confused linking of usury and heresy; Flemish merchants were much suspected, perhaps because of their connections with the Albigensian south, perhaps because money itself had a set of unholy connotations, especially where profits or increases (breeding) were concerned. But gradually the world was made safe for the early capitalist ethic of thrift and profit-making.
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The Jews played an important part in the growth of money transactions. By their nature they were a group both related to Christianity and cast out from the Christian community. In France they had long been forced to restrict themselves to money matters; in return the kings had protected them and, until the ninth century, had indeed left them free to own their own land and carry on ordinary trade. In the early medieval world they thus had a close connection with royal finances; and being compelled to limit their talents to a single field, they did much to advance its systematization. William of Malmesbury says that they were brought to England by William I; and this statement is supported by a petition of 1275 in which the Jews of England speak of their establishment ‘since the conquest of the land’.[511] William may well have meant to use them as financial agents who would collect dues in cash rather than in land and produce. They continued to have a peculiarly close link with the king, and were considered his legal chattels. Thus their wealth was not technically theirs at all; at their deaths the king could, and at times did, take over the whole estate, not the third which was the usual tax. When the biggest financier of the thirteenth century, Aaron of Lincoln, died in 1186 his estate became an escheat to the crown and a special branch of the exchequer was set up to deal with it; fifteen years later the king had still not got settlement of all his debts. Two other rich Jews were the brothers Jurnet and Benedict of Norwich. Jurnet was said to have married a Christian heiress and converted her to Judaism, so that she lost her lands and was fined six thousand marks — all the Jewish communities in England being jointly responsible for the debt. The tale has been disproved; but it was a fact that a consortium of the two brothers and some London Jews was forced to buy the king’s pardon for some offence (probably financial) in 1177 for the same sum. And a similar fine had to be met by Jurnet in 1184; the Pipe Rolls show that his bonds were transferred to the English Jewry as a community —apparently the usual way of realizing a debtor’s assets. But he remained a man of substance; he bought a house in Norwich in 1189, and in 1190 he accounted for a fine of £170 imposed on him at Windsor.[512]
Jews thus formed a cooperative banking system that spread over the whole realm, and they advanced large sums to the exchequer to meet sudden calls. Repayments were generally made through drafts on sheriffs to be met out of the taxation of the shires. When a property tax was levied in 1188 to finance the third crusade, the Jews were told to contribute a fourth of their property and were expected to provide £60,000 as against £70,000 to come from a levy of a tenth on all the other citizens of the land.[513] They could sue debtors in English royal courts. Henry I gave them a charter of protection and allowed them to travel freely, to be exempt from toll, and to hold land taken in pledge as a security. Their heydey was under Henry III, with his extension of the fiscal system, when they were given the right of internal jurisdiction according to Talmudic law. Their numbers were swollen by the expulsions from France in 1182. The kings, as we saw, were ready to squeeze them, but did not want to see them broken or wiped out. If a Jew got hold of most of a Christian’s estate, the king could confiscate the property on his death; and at times the crown took over a Jew’s debts, scaring the noble and ecclesiastical debtors since it was likely to show less mercy. Attacks on Jews were liable to destroy their archives and thus threatened the crown as residuary legatee of Jewish debts. So Archbishop Walter set up archives in the chief towns where bonds between Jew and gentile could be safely kept under the supervision of the so called Exchequer of the Jews.[514]
The Jews were thus the obvious ‘inner enemy’: they were held by the church to be responsible for the execution of Jesus and at the same time had been compelled to embody the alienating force of money. The crusades piously stimulated their massacre and oppression. On Easter Eve of 1144 the corpse of a young apprentice was found in woods near Norwich and a rumour spread that local Jews had crucified him on the second day of the Passover in imitation of Christ. The sheriff tried to protect the Jews, but the bishop opposed him and encouraged the agitation. At Richard I’s coronation, Sunday 3 September 1189, there was a murderous riot against London Jews, with fresh outbursts in Lent, probably stimulated by the approaching crusades. The Jewish leader, seeing that the situation was hopeless, set fire to a funeral pyre in the castle tower where the refugees had fled. The church did its best to make things hard for the Jews. The Lateran council of 1179 forbade Christians to live in Jewish communities and Jews to employ Christians; that of 1215 ordered Jews to wear a piece of yellow or crimson cloth to mark them out — on the grounds that otherwise a Christian might copulate with a Jewess or a Jew with a Christian female. Excited by the story of a deacon converted to Judaism and marrying a Jewess (for which he was burned), the church council of Oxford promulgated a series of anti-Jewish laws, which grew harsher throughout the thirteenth century.
The odd sardonic nature of William Rufus comes out in the tales of his relations with Jews. Once he staged a debate between Gilbert Crispin, abbot of Westminster, and a learned Jew from Mainz. William of Malmesbury says:
At Rouen they tried to prevail through gifts on some converted Jews to return to Judaism; at another time at London they entered into controversy with our bishops, because the king in jest, as I suppose, had said that if they mastered the Christians in open argument he’d become one of their sect.[515]
Eadmer tells how a Jewish lad at Rouen had a vision in which St Stephen bade him be baptized. He obeyed, but his father rushed to Rufus and begged him to compel his son to return to his ancestral faith. He had heard that recently the king ‘in return for a money payment had restored a number of persons in the same situation to Judaism’. At first Rufus took no notice of the pleas; then the Jew promised to give him sixty silver marks. Rufus called the lad in and ordered him to abandon his conversion. ‘My lord king, I think you must be joking,’ cried the lad. The king shouted back, ‘Joking with you, you son of the dungheap, you’d better go back and obey my command, and that quickly, or by the holy face of Lucca I’ll have your eyes torn out!’ The lad refused and was at last driven away. William then asked for his sixty marks. The Jew demurred on the grounds that William had failed on his side of the bargain, but after some argument agreed to pay half the sum.
The Jews did not have a monopoly of money-lending despite the prohibitions of usury. There was for example William Cade, with his headquarters at St Omer, who flourished in mid-twelfth century and was long remembered on the continent as a man of vast wealth with agents ‘through all the climata of the world’. Under John the exchequer was still struggling to collect all the debts under his bonds that had fallen into Henry II’s hands at his death. The latter king paid him for supplying gold for crown and regalia by a precept on the sheriff of Berkshire. Payments over ten years amounted to about £5,600.[516]
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Already in the eleventh century, as part of the general economic and social advance, the basis of many technological ideas and applications was being laid, and this was to bear important fruit in the following centuries. The later developments are well known; what is more obscure is the way in which during the Dark Ages and the early medieval period peasants and craftsmen, because of their relative freedom and their initiative and readiness to experiment with labour processes, were able to take the first crucial steps in new directions. Foremost among the new devices were the treadle loom and the fulling mill. In the late tenth and in the eleventh century evidence starts coming up to show that water-power was being used for other processes than the grinding
of corn. There are fulling mills in Italy, using the cam; and water-driven trip-hammers began to work in the forges of Germany. At Grenoble was a fulling mill, and about 1085, one for treating hemp. St Wandrille near Rouen was getting in tithes by 1080 from a fulling mill; and at least by 1086 two mills in England were paying rent for blooms of iron, showing that water-power was used at forges.[517] By the thirteenth century mechanical fulling of cloth, supplanting the method by hand or foot, was decisive in shifting the centre of textiles from the south-east to the north-west where water-power was easier to get at. More and more, all over Europe, we meet mills for tanning or laundering, for sawing or crushing anything from olives to ore, for reducing pigments for paint or pulp for paper, for producing mash for beer, for operating the bellows of blast furnaces, fore-hammers, or grindstones for polishing weapons and armour. Those developments lay well ahead, but the basis for them was laid back in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and earlier.[518]
Though we cannot enter here into the growth of the universities, in part out of the old cathedral and monastic schools, nor into the great advances in many fields of thought in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we may note the part played by Englishmen in the early phases of learning from Arab culture and of preparing for the birth of a new scientific approach. The godless reign of Rufus had seen the stirring of scientific interests and attitudes. Early in the twelfth century Adelard of Bath went abroad in search of Arabic learning; later in the century Daniel of Morley did the same. Both men returned to England. Adelard translated Euclid’s Geometry and introduced the works of Khwarizmi to the west in fragmentary form; Robert of Chester, in about 1144, translated the same mathematician’s On the Restoration of Opposition of Numbers, called Al Gebra (The Book) by Arab scholars; hence our term Algebra. Michael the Scot (who died in 1224) was described by the pope while still alive as ‘burning from boyhood with the love of science’. He introduced Avicenna and Averroes to the west.
