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From credit to debt: A political history of English sovereign finance and money from the seventh century to the seventeenth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Nicholas Dorn
Nicholas Dorn*
Affiliation:
Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, UK
*
Corresponding author: Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR, UK. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

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This article provides a new perspective on sovereign finance and money in England from pre-modern to early modern times. Re-reading the literature on sovereign fiscality through the lens of sovereign jurisdictions and religious authority, it describes two distinct forms of sovereign finance: the rise and fall of sovereign credit from the seventh to eleventh century, followed by sovereign debt developing from the eleventh century into ‘modern’ sovereign debt from the seventeenth century onwards. In the early Anglo Saxon period, sovereign credit was given and received in non-monetised forms. It was when sovereign jurisdictions became too wide for labour and bulky produce to travel that tax was monetised. However, the monetisation of credit undermined the very sovereign-subject relation on which sovereign credit was based. After the introduction of short-term sovereign debt by the Normans, for the next five hundred years, the two distinct fiscal mechanisms of sovereign credit and sovereign debt ran in parallel, although the latter was restrained by the church's prohibition of usury. In the seventeenth century, sovereign credit and sovereign debt became conjoined elements within one fiscal system, rather than separate mechanisms.

Keywords

Pre-modern Englandsovereigntyreligionwarfiscalitystate theory of money
Type
Article
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , 2019 , pp. 42 - 60
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2019 The Author(s)

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