The replacement of rents in kind by payments in money is considered by many historians as a marker of the commercialization of the economy and thus of its modernization. The case of medieval Normandy does not confirm this development, however: the sources testify to a common use of money since the end of the eleventh century, but also to the persistence until the fifteenth century of payment in kind, including in the field of credit. The article examines the case of the Caen region, for which there is abundant evidence from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of annuities purchased with money from peasants in exchange for annual repayments in grain. This system allowed a significant transfer of monetary value to the countryside, while guaranteeing the supply of urban markets and welfare institutions. Although these contracts were usually secured by pledges on plots of land, they did not lead to the expropriation of peasants, but rather promoted the growth of credit markets in the countryside.

The literature on the rural economy of the high and late Middle Ages has long established a close correlation between three significant features of the period: the spread of rural credit, the dynamism of the peasant land market and the expropriation of peasant land by the creditors, usually yeomen or urban landowners. There has even been talk for some countries (northern Italy) of a deliberate strategy of territorial conquest, insofar as the credit provided by urban lenders would aim at the expropriation of land from insolvent debtors. This article studies for the Mediterranean Spain of the late Middle Ages, and in particular for the old kingdom of Valencia, other objectives of rural credit and other alternatives to peasant expropriation in case of insolvency. Based on the rich archival holdings of the region, mainly notarial and judicial records, the article studies the dissemination of rural credit, the different modalities (short and long term), the motivations of creditors and debtors, the types of interest, the guarantors and the goods given as collateral for the loans, their confiscation in case of delay or insolvency. It concludes that, unlike elsewhere, the creditors, rather than in land, were interested in rents, that is, in the annuities paid to them by the debtors as interest on the loans obtained. The spread of long-term credit, therefore, not only did not threaten or subvert but also strengthened a system of land ownership, tenure and management based on regular rents extraction.

In this paper, an attempt will be made to discuss the likely context for pre-plague indications of expropriation and its limits. There is plentiful evidence of an active land market in medieval villages by the end of the thirteenth century, and most likely for some time earlier. Fluctuation in the rate of buying and selling coincided with difficult harvest years and suggests a link between impecunious peasant sellers and wealthier peasant buyers. There is also some association between the selling of land and pre-existing indebtedness. In a period of partial commercial and market development, the extent to which exchange of land or of moveables proceeded to a significant structural redistribution of land and resources was constrained, and even in those parts of the country where an early peasant land market was well-established, significant adjustment is not evident. Instead, impediments to expropriation, such as seigneurial control of peasant land and limited capacity for extensive capital accumulation, acted as constraints on significant accumulation and redistribution. That said, there is limited suggestion in our sources of a redistribution of property rights associable with inequality of dealing and the advantage of wealthier landholders and creditors. In exploring this last point, particular use is made of the court records for the Welsh marcher lordship of Dyffryn Clwyd.

Exogenous intervention in land ownership began with few court judgments prior to the weighty Land Code in 1858; but it was especially this law which officially overturned the status quo by permitting registration of cultivated land in the names of non-cultivators. This changed the rules of the game for the peasantry in Palestine. Informally, yet practically, peasants had been the de facto owners of almost all cultivated lands in Palestine for generations. Following the landmark intervention of 1858, non-peasants seized the opportunity to acquire economic assets. They purchased and confiscated peasant lands or manipulated registration of peasant lands into their own names, and the peasants often became their tenants. The additional purchase of lands by Zionist settlers in latter years, compounded by rural demographic growth, intensified this pressure. By 1930, three-quarters of Arab peasants in Palestine cultivated lands they no longer formally owned, while others were pushed to migrate to cities.