Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study

La miséricorde de Dieu est infinie: elle sauvera même un riche.

ANATOLE FRANCE, Le Puits de Sainte Claire

I MUST begin these lectures with an apology. Their subject is historical. It is the attitude of religious thought in England towards social organization and economic issues in the period immediately preceding the Reformation and in the two centuries which follow it. Canon Scott Holland was at once a prophet and a theologian. The most suitable beginning for a foundation established to commemorate him would have been either an examination of the spiritual problems concealed behind the economic mechanism of our society, or a philosophical discussion of the contribution which religion can make to their solution. Discretion compels one who is competent neither to inspire to action nor to expound a system, to refrain from meddling with these high matters. I have therefore chosen the humbler task of trying to give an account of the history of opinion during one critical period. But I do so with the consciousness that the choice is due, less to any special appropriateness on the part of the subject, than to the inability of the lecturer to attempt any other.

I would not, however, excuse the selection merely by my own incapacity to do justice to a topic of more immediate moment. Thanks largely to Canon Scott Holland, and to those who worked with him, the conception of the scope and content of Christian ethics which was generally, though not universally, accepted in the nineteenth century, is undergoing a revision; and in that revision the appeal to the experience of mankind, which is history, has played some part, and will play a larger one. There have been periods in which a tacit agreement, accepted in practice if not stated in theory, excluded economic activities and social institutions from examination or criticism in the light of religion. A statesman of the early nineteenth century, whose conception of the relations of Church and State appears to have been modelled on those of Mr Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, is said to have crushed a clerical reformer with the protest, ‘Things have come to a pretty pass if religion is going to interfere with private life’; and a more recent occupant of his office has explained the catastrophe which must follow, if the Church crosses the Rubicon which divides the outlying provinces of the spirit from the secular capital of public affairs.¹

Whatever the merit of these aphorisms, it is evident today that the line of division between the spheres of religion and secular business, which they assume as self-evident, is shifting. By common consent the treaty of partition has lapsed and the boundaries are once more in motion. The age of which Froude, no romantic admirer of ecclesiastical pretensions, could write, with perhaps exaggerated severity, that the spokesmen of religion ‘leave the present world to the men of business and the devil’,² shows some signs of drawing to a close. Rightly or wrongly, with wisdom or with its opposite, not only in England but on the Continent and in America, not only in one denomination but among Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Nonconformists, an attempt is being made to restate the practical implications of the social ethics of the Christian faith, in a form sufficiently comprehensive to provide a standard by which to judge the collective actions and institutions of mankind, in the sphere both of international politics and of social organization. It is being made today. It has been made in the past. Whether it will result in any new synthesis, whether in the future at some point pushed farther into the tough world of practical affairs men will say,

Here nature first begins

Her farthest verge, and chaos to retire

As from her outmost works, a broken foe,

will not be known by this generation. What is certain is that, as in the analogous problem of the relations between Church and State, issues which were thought to have been buried by the discretion of centuries have shown in our own day that they were not dead, but sleeping. To examine the forms which they have assumed and the phases through which they have passed, even in the narrow field of a single country and a limited period, is not mere antiquarianism. It is to summon the living, not to invoke a corpse, and to see from a new angle the problems of our own age, by widening the experience brought to their consideration.

In such an examination the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are obviously a critical period. Dr Figgis ³ has described the secularization of political theory as the most momentous of the intellectual changes which ushered in the modern world. It was not the less revolutionary because it was only gradually that its full consequences became apparent, so that seeds which were sown before the Reformation yielded their fruit in England only after the Civil War. The political aspects of the transformation are familiar. The theological mould which shaped political theory from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century is broken; politics becomes a science, ultimately a group of sciences, and theology at best one science among others. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority. Religion, ceasing to be the master-interest of mankind, dwindles into a department of life with boundaries which it is extravagant to overstep.

The ground which it vacates is occupied by a new institution, armed with a novel doctrine. If the Church of the Middle Ages was a kind of State, the State of the Tudors had some of the characteristics of a Church; and it was precisely the impossibility, for all but a handful of sectaries, of conceiving a society which treated religion as a thing privately vital but publicly indifferent, which in England made irreconcilable the quarrel between Puritanism and the monarchy. When the mass had been heated in the furnace of the Civil War, its component parts were ready to be disengaged from each other. By the end of the seventeenth century the secular State, separate from the Churches, which are subordinate to it, has emerged from the theory which had regarded both as dual aspects of a single society. The former pays a shadowy deference to religion; the latter do not meddle with the external fabric of the political and social system, which is the concern of the former. The age of religious struggles virtually ends with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The age of the wars of economic nationalism virtually begins with the war between England and Holland under the Commonwealth and Charles II. The State, first in England, then in France and America, finds its sanction, not in religion, but in nature, in a presumed contract to establish it, in the necessity for mutual protection and the convenience of mutual assistance. It appeals to no supernatural commission, but exists to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature. ‘The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property.’⁴

While the political significance of this development has often been described, the analogous changes in social and economic thought have received less attention. These were, however, momentous, and deserve consideration. The emer gence of an objective and passionless economic science took place more slowly than the corresponding movement in the theory of the State, because the issues were less absorbing, and, while one marched in the high lights of the open stage, the other lurked on the back stairs and in the wings. It was not till a century after Machiavelli had emancipated the State from religion, that the doctrine of the self-contained department with laws of its own begins generally to be applied to the world of business relations, and, even in the England of the early seventeenth century, to discuss questions of economic organization purely in terms of pecuniary profit and loss still wears an air of not quite reputable cynicism. When the sixteenth century opens, not only political but social theory is saturated with doctrines drawn from the sphere of ethics and religion, and economic phenomena are expressed in terms of personal conduct, as naturally and inevitably as the nineteenth century expressed them in terms of mechanism.

Not the least fundamental of divisions among theories of society is between those which regard the world of human affairs as self-contained, and those which appeal to a supernatural criterion. Modern social theory, like modern political theory, developed only when society was given a naturalistic instead of a religious explanation, and the rise of both was largely due to a changed conception of the nature and functions of a Church. The crucial period is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most important arena (apart from Holland) is England, because it is in England, with its new geographical position as the entrepot between Europe and America, its achievement of internal economic unity two centuries before France and two and a half centuries before Germany, its constitutional revolution, and its powerful bourgeoisie of bankers, ship-owners, and merchants, that the transformation of the structure of society is earliest, swiftest, and most complete. Its essence is the secularization of social and economic philosophy. The synthesis is resolved into its elements – politics, business, and spiritual exercises; each assumes a separate and independent vitality and obeys the laws of its own being. The social functions matured within the Church, and long identified with it, are transferred to the State, which in turn is idolized as the dispenser of prosperity and the guardian of civilization. The theory of a hierarchy of values, embracing all human interests and activities in a system of which the apex is religion, is replaced by the conception of separate and parallel compartments between which a due balance should be maintained, but which have no vital connexion with each other.

The intellectual movement is, of course, very gradual, and is compatible with both throw-backs and precocities which seem to refute its general character. It is easy to detect premonitions of the coming philosophy in the later Middle Ages, and reversions to an earlier manner at the very end of the seventeenth century. Oresme in the fourteenth century can anticipate the monetary theory associated with the name of Gresham; in the fifteenth century Laurentius de Rudolfis can distinguish between trade bills and finance bills, and St Antonino describe the significance of capital; while Baxter in 1673 can write a Christian Directory in the style of a medieval Summa, and Bunyan in 1680 can dissect the economic iniquities of Mr Badman, who ground the poor with high prices and usury, in the manner of a medieval friar.⁵ But the distance traversed in the two centuries between 1500 and 1700 is, nevertheless, immense. At the earlier date, though economic rationalism has proceeded far in Italy, the typical economic systems are those of the Schoolmen; the typical popular teaching is that of the sermon, or of manuals such as Dives et Pauper; the typical appeal in difficult cases of conscience is to the Bible, the Fathers, the canon law and its interpreters; the typical controversy is carried on in terms of morality and religion as regularly and inevitably as two centuries later it is conducted in terms of economic expediency.

It is not necessary to point out that the age of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell had nothing to learn from the twentieth century as to the niceties of political intrigue or commercial sharp practice. But a cynical unscrupulousness in high places is not incompatible with a general belief in the validity of moral standards which are contradicted by it. No one can read the discussions which took place between 1500 and 1550 on three burning issues – the rise in prices, capital and interest, and the land question in England – without being struck by the constant appeal from the new and clamorous economic interests of the day to the traditional Christian morality, which in social organization, as in the relations of individuals, is still conceived to be the final authority. It is because it is regarded as the final authority that the officers of the Church claim to be heard on questions of social policy, and that, however Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists may differ on doctrine or ecclesiastical government, Luther and Calvin, Latimer and Laud, John Knox and the Pilgrim Fathers are agreed that social morality is the province of the Church, and are prepared both to teach it, and to enforce it, when necessary, by suitable discipline.

By the middle of the seventeenth century all that is altered. After the Restoration, we are in a new world of economic, as well as of political, thought. The claim of religion, at best a shadowy claim, to maintain rules of good conscience in economic affairs finally vanished with the destruction of Laud’s experiment in a confessional State, and with the failure of the work of the Westminster Assembly. After the Civil War, the attempt to maintain the theory that there was a Christian standard of economic conduct was impossible, not only because of lay opposition, but because the division of the Churches made it evident that no common standard existed which could be enforced by ecclesiastical machinery. The doctrine of the Restoration economists,⁶ that, as proved by the experience of Holland, trade and tolerance flourished together, had its practical significance in the fact that neither could prosper without large concessions to individualism.

The ground which is vacated by the Christian moralist is quickly occupied by theorists of another order. The future for the next two hundred years is not with the attempt to reaffirm, with due allowance for altered circumstances, the conception that a moral rule is binding on Christians in their economic transactions, but with the new science of Political Arithmetic, which asserts, at first with hesitation and then with confidence, that no moral rule beyond the letter of the law exists. Influenced in its method by the contemporary progress of mathematics and physics, it handles economic phenomena, not as a casuist, concerned to distinguish right from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new calculus to impersonal economic forces. Its method, temper, and assumptions are accepted by all educated men, including the clergy, even though its particular conclusions continue for long to be disputed. Its greatest English exponent, before the days of Adam Smith, is the Reverend Dr Tucker, Dean of Gloucester.

Some of the particular stages in this transition will be discussed later. But that there was a transition, and that the intellectual and moral conversion which it produced was not less momentous than the effect of some more familiar intellectual revolutions, is undeniable. Nor is it to be refuted by insisting that economic motives and economic needs are as old as history, or that the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism. A medieval cynic, in expounding the canon law as to usury, remarked that ‘he who takes it goes to hell, and he who does not goes to the workhouse’.⁷ Mr Coulton does well to remind us that, even in the Age of Faith, resounding principles were compatible with very sordid practice. In a discussion which has as its subject social thought, not the history of business organization, it is not necessary to elaborate that truism. Only the credulous or the disillusioned will contrast successive periods as light with darkness or darkness with light, or yield to the temper which finds romantic virtues in every age except its own. To appraise the merits of different theories of social organization must be left to those who feel confident that they possess an adequate criterion. All that can be attempted in these pages is to endeavour to understand a few among them.

For, after all, because doctrine and conduct diverge, it does not follow that to examine the former is to hunt abstractions. That men should have thought as they did is sometimes as significant as that they should have acted as they did, and not least significant when thought and practice are at variance. It may be true that ‘theory is a criticism of life only in the same sense as a good man is a criticism of a bad one’. But the emphasis of the theorist on certain aspects and values is not arbitrary, but is itself significant, and, if his answers are to be discounted, his questions are none the less evidence as to the assumptions of the period in which they were asked. It would be paradoxical to dismiss Machiavelli and Locke and Smith and Bentham as irrelevant to the political practice of their age, merely on the ground that mankind has still to wait for the ideal Prince or Whig or Individualist or Utilitarian. It is not less paradoxical to dismiss those who formulated economic and social theories in the Middle Ages or in the sixteenth century merely because, behind canon law and summae and sermons, behind the good ordinances of borough and gild, behind statutes and proclamations and prerogative courts, there lurked the immutable appetites of the economic man.

There is an evolution of ideas, as well as of organisms, and the quality of civilization depends, as Professor Wallas has so convincingly shown, on the transmission, less of physical qualities, than of a complex structure of habits, knowledge, and beliefs, the destruction of which would be followed within a year by the death of half the human race. Granted that the groundwork of inherited dispositions with which the individual is born has altered little in recorded history, the interests and values which compose his world have undergone a succession of revolutions. The conventional statement that human nature does not change is plausible only so long as attention is focused on those aspects of it which are least distinctively human. The wolf is today what he was when he was hunted by Nimrod. But, while men are born with many of the characteristics of wolves, man is a wolf domesticated, who both transmits the arts by which he has been partially tamed and improves upon them. He steps into a social inheritance, to which each generation adds its own contribution of good and evil, before it bequeaths it to its successors.

There is a moral and religious, as well as a material, environment, which sets its stamp on the individual, even when he is least conscious of it. And the effect of changes in this environment is not less profound. The economic categories of modern society, such as property, freedom of contract, and competition, are as much a part of its intellectual furniture as its political conceptions, and, together with religion, have probably been the most potent force in giving it its character. Between the conception of society as a community of unequal classes with varying functions, organized for a common end, and that which regards it as a mechanism adjusting itself through the play of economic motives to the supply of economic needs; between the idea that a man must not take advantage of his neighbour’s necessity, and the doctrine that ‘man’s self-love is God’s providence’; between the attitude which appeals to a religious standard to repress economic appetites, and that which regards expediency as the final criterion – there is a chasm which no theory of the permanence and ubiquity of economic interests can bridge, and which deserves at least to be explored. To examine how the latter grew out of the former; to trace the change, from a view of economic activity which regarded it as one among other kinds of moral conduct, to the view of it as dependent upon impersonal and almost automatic forces; to observe the struggle of individualism, in the face of restrictions imposed in the name of religion by the Church and of public policy by the State, first denounced, then palliated, then triumphantly justified in the name of economic liberty; to watch how ecclesiastical authority strives to maintain its hold upon the spheres it had claimed and finally abdicates them – to do this is not to indulge a vain curiosity, but to stand at the sources of rivulets which are now a flood.

Has religious opinion in the past regarded questions of social organization and economic conduct as irrelevant to the life of the spirit, or has it endeavoured not only to christianize the individual but to make a Christian civilization? Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis between personal morality and the practices which are permissible in business? Does the idea of a Church involve the acceptance of any particular standard of social ethics, and, if so, ought a Church to endeavour to enforce it as among the obligations incumbent on its members? Such are a few of the questions which men are asking today, and on which a more competent examination of history than I can hope to offer might throw at any rate an oblique and wavering light.

(i)

The Social Organism

We are asking these questions today. Men were asking the same questions, though in different language, throughout the sixteenth century. It is a commonplace that modern economic history begins with a series of revolutionary changes in the direction and organization of commerce, in finance, in prices, and in agriculture. To the new economic situation men brought a body of doctrine, law, and tradition, hammered out during the preceding three centuries. Since the new forces were bewildering, and often shocking, to conservative consciences, moralists and religious teachers met them at first by a re-affirmation of the traditional doctrines, by which, it seemed, their excesses might be restrained and their abuses corrected. As the changed environment became, not a novelty, but an established fact, these doctrines had to be modified. As the effects of the Reformation developed, different Churches produced characteristic differences of social opinion.

But these were later developments, which only gradually became apparent. The new economic world was not accepted without a struggle. Apart from a few extremists, the first generation of reformers were rarely innovators in matters of social theory, and quoted Fathers and church councils, decretals and canon lawyers, in complete unconsciousness that changes in doctrine and church government involved any breach with what they had learned to regard as the moral tradition of Christendom. Hence the sixteenth century sees a collision, not only between different schools of religious thought, but between the changed economic environment and the accepted theory of society. To understand it, one must place oneself at the point from which it started. One must examine, however summarily, the historical background.

That background consisted of the body of social theory, stated and implicit, which was the legacy of the Middle Ages. The formal teaching was derived from the Bible, the works of the Fathers and Schoolmen, the canon law and its commentators, and had been popularized in sermons and religious manuals. The informal assumptions were those implicit in law, custom, and social institutions. Both were complex, and to speak of them as a unity is to sacrifice truth to convenience. It may be that the political historian is justified when he covers with a single phrase the five centuries or more to which tradition has assigned the title of the Middle Ages. For the student of economic conditions that suggestion of homogeneity is the first illusion to be discarded.

The medieval economic world was marked, it is true, by certain common characteristics. They sprang from the fact that on the west it was a closed system, that on the north it had so much elbow-room as was given by the Baltic and the rivers emptying themselves into it, and that on the east, where it was open, the apertures were concentrated along a comparatively short coast-line from Alexandria to the Black Sea, so that they were easily commanded by any naval power dominating the eastern Mediterranean, and easily cut by any military power which could squat across the trade routes before they reached the sea. While, however, these broad facts determined that the two main currents of trade should run from east to west and north to south, and that the most progressive economic life of the age should cluster in the regions from which these currents started and where they met, within this general economic framework there was the greatest variety of condition and development. The contours of economic civilization ran on different lines from those of subsequent centuries, but the contrast between mountain and valley was not less clearly marked. If the sites on which a complex economic structure rose were far removed from those of later generations, it flourished none the less where conditions favoured its growth. In spite of the ubiquity of manor and gild, there was as much difference between the life of a centre of capitalist industry, like fifteenth-century Flanders, or a centre of capitalist finance, like fifteenth-century Florence, and a pastoral society exporting raw materials and a little food, like medieval England, as there is between modern Lancashire or London and modern Denmark. To draw from English conditions a picture of a whole world stagnating in economic squalor, or basking in economic innocence, is as absurd as to reconstruct the economic life of Europe in the twentieth century from a study of the Shetland Islands or the Ukraine. The elements in the social theory of the Middle Ages were equally various, and equally changing. Even if the student confines himself to the body of doctrine which is definitely associated with religion, and takes as typical of it the Summae of the Schoolmen, he finds it in constant process of development. The economic teaching of St Antonino in the fifteenth century, for example, was far more complex and realistic than that of St Thomas in the thirteenth, and down to the very end of the Middle Ages the best-established and most characteristic parts of the system – for instance, the theory of prices and of usury – so far from being stationary, were steadily modified and elaborated.

There are, perhaps, four main attitudes which religious opinion may adopt toward the world of social institutions and economic relations. It may stand on one side in ascetic aloofness and regard them as in their very nature the sphere of unrighteousness, from which men may escape – from which, if they consider their souls, they will escape – but which they can conquer only by flight. It may take them for granted and ignore them, as matters of indifference belonging to a world with which religion has no concern; in all ages the prudence of looking problems boldly in the face and passing on has seemed too self-evident to require justification. It may throw itself into an agitation for some particular reform, for the removal of some crying scandal, for the promotion of some final revolution, which will inaugurate the reign of righteousness on earth. It may at once accept and criticize, tolerate and amend, welcome the gross world of human appetites, as the squalid scaffolding from amid which the life of the spirit must rise, and insist that this also is the material of the Kingdom of God. To such a temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or dead, but none are too mean to be beneath or too great to be above it, since all, in their different degrees, are touched with the spirit which permeates the whole. It finds its most sublime expression in the words of Piccarda: ‘Paradise is everywhere, though the grace of the highest good is not shed everywhere in the same degree.’

Each of these attitudes meets us today. Each meets us in the thought of the Middle Ages, as differences of period and place and economic environment and personal temperament evoke it. In the early Middle Ages the ascetic temper predominates. The author of the Elucidarium, for example, who sees nothing in economic life but the struggle of wolves over carrion, thinks that men of business can hardly be saved, for they live by cheating and profiteering.⁸ It is monasticism, with its repudiation of the prizes and temptations of the secular world, which is par excellence the life of religion. As one phase of it succumbed to ease and affluence, another rose to restore the primitive austerity, and the return to evangelical poverty, preached by St Francis but abandoned by many of his followers, was the note of the majority of movements for reform. As for indifferentism—what else, for all its communistic phrases, is Wyclif’s teaching, that the ‘just man is already lord of all’ and that ‘in this world God must serve the devil’, but an anticipation of the doctrine of celestial happiness as the compensation of earthly misery, to which Hobbes gave a cynical immortality when he wrote that the persecuted, instead of rebelling, ‘must expect their reward in Heaven’, and which Mr and Mrs Hammond have revealed as an opiate dulling both the pain and the agitation of the Industrial Revolution? If obscure sects like the Poor Men of Lyons are too unorthodox to be cited, the Friars are not, and it was not only Langland, and that gentlemanly journalist, Froissart, who accused them – the phrase has a long history – of stirring up class hatred.

To select from so immense a sea of ideas about society and religion only the specimens that fit the meshes of one’s own small net and to label them ‘medieval thought’, is to beg all questions. Ideas have a pedigree which, if realized, would often embarrass their exponents. The day has long since passed when it could be suggested that only one-half of modern Christianity has its roots in medieval religion. There is a medieval Puritanism and Rationalism as well as a medieval Catholicism. In the field of ecclesiastical theory, as Mr Manning has pointed out in his excellent book,⁹ Gregory VII and Boniface VIII have their true successors in Calvin and Knox. What is true of religion and political thought is equally true of economic and social doctrines. The social theories of Luther and Latimer, of Bucer and Bullinger, of sixteenth-century Anabaptists and seventeenth-century Levellers, of Puritans like Baxter, Anglicans like Laud, Baptists like Bunyan, Quakers like Bellers, are all the children of medieval parents. Like the Church today in regions which have not yet emerged from savagery, the Church of the earlier Middle Ages had been engaged in an immense missionary effort, in which, as it struggled with the surrounding barbarism, the work of conversion and of social construction had been almost indistinguishable. By the very nature of its task, as much as by the intention of its rulers, it had become the greatest of political institutions. For good or evil it aspired to be, not a sect, but a civilization, and, when its unity was shattered at the Reformation, the different Churches which emerged from it endeavoured, according to their different opportunities, to perpetuate the same tradition. Asceticism or renunciation, quietism or indifferentism, the zeal which does well to be angry, the temper which seeks a synthesis of the external order and the religion of the spirit – all alike, in one form or another, are represented in the religious thought and practice of the Middle Ages.

All are represented in it, but not all are equally representative of it. Of the four attitudes suggested above, it is the last which is most characteristic. The first fundamental assumption which is taken over by the sixteenth century is that the ultimate standard of human institutions and activities is religion. The architectonics of the system had been worked out in the Summae of the Schoolmen. In sharp contrast to the modern temper, which takes the destination for granted, and is thrilled by the hum of the engine, medieval religious thought strains every interest and activity, by however arbitrary a compression, into the service of a single idea. The lines of its scheme run up and down, and, since purpose is universal and all-embracing, there is, at least in theory, no room for eccentric bodies which move in their own private orbit. That purpose is set by the divine plan of the universe. ‘The perfect happiness of man cannot be other than the vision of the divine essence.’¹⁰

Hence all activities fall within a single system, because all, though with different degrees of immediateness, are related to a single end, and derive their significance from it. The Church in its wider sense is the Christian Commonwealth, within which that end is to be realized; in its narrower sense it is the hierarchy divinely commissioned for its interpretation; in both it embraces the whole of life, and its authority is final. Though practice is perpetually at variance with theory, there is no absolute division between the inner and personal life, which is ‘the sphere of religion’, and the practical interests, the external order, the impersonal mechanism, to which, if some modern teachers may be trusted, religion is irrelevant.

There is no absolute division, but there is a division of quality. There are – to use a modern phrase – degrees of reality. The distinctive feature of medieval thought is that contrasts which later were to be presented as irreconcilable antitheses appear in it as differences within a larger unity, and that the world of social organization, originating in physical necessities, passes by insensible gradations into that of the spirit. Man shares with other animals the necessity of maintaining and perpetuating his species; in addition, as a natural creature, he has what is peculiar to himself, an inclination to the life of the intellect and of society – ‘to know the truth about God and to live in communities’.¹¹ These activities, which form his life according to the law of nature, may be regarded, and sometimes are regarded, as indifferent or hostile to the life of the spirit. But the characteristic thought is different. It is that of a synthesis.

The contrast between nature and grace, between human appetites and interests and religion, is not absolute, but relative. It is a contrast of matter and the spirit informing it, of stages in a process, of preparation and fruition. Grace works on the unregenerate nature of man, not to destroy it, but to transform it. And what is true of the individual is true of society. An attempt is made to give it a new significance by relating it to the purpose of human life as known by revelation. In the words of a famous (or notorious) Bull: ‘The way of religion is to lead the things which are lower to the things which are higher through the things which are intermediate. According to the law of the universe all things are not reduced to order equally and immediately; but the lowest through the intermediate, the intermediate through the higher.’¹² Thus social institutions assume a character which may almost be called sacramental, for they are the outward and imperfect expression of a supreme spiritual reality. Ideally conceived, society is an organism of different grades, and human activities form a hierarchy of functions, which differ in kind and in significance, but each of which is of value on its own plane, provided that it is governed, however remotely, by the end which is common to all. Like the celestial order, of which it is the dim reflection, society is stable, because it is straining upwards:

Anzi è formale ad esto beato esse,

Tenersi dentro alla divina voglia,

Per ch’ una fansi nostre voglie stesse.

Needless to say, metaphysics, however sublime, were not the daily food of the Middle Ages, any more than of today. The fifteenth century saw an outburst of commercial activity and of economic speculation, and by the middle of it all this teaching was becoming antiquated. Needless to say, also, general ideas cannot be kept in compartments, and the conviction of medieval thinkers that life has a divine purpose coloured the interpretation of common affairs, as it was coloured by physics in the eighteenth century and by the idea of evolution in the nineteenth. If the first legacy of the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century was the idea of religion as embracing all aspects of human life, the second and third flowed naturally from the working of that idea in the economic environment of the time. They may be called, respectively, the functional view of class organization, and the doctrine of economic ethics.

From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, from the work of Becket’s secretary in 1159 to the work of Henry VIII’s chaplain in 1537, the analogy by which society is described – an analogy at once fundamental and commonplace – is the same.¹³ Invoked in every economic crisis to rebuke extortion and dissension with a high doctrine of social solidarity, it was not finally discarded till the rise of a theoretical individualism in England in the seventeenth century. It is that of the human body. The gross facts of the social order are accepted, in all their harshness and brutality. They are accepted with astonishing docility, and, except on rare occasions, there is no question of reconstruction. What they include is no trifle. It is nothing less than the whole edifice of feudal society – class privilege, class oppression, exploitation, serfdom. But these things cannot, it is thought, be treated as simply alien to religion, for religion is all-comprehensive. They must be given some ethical meaning, must be shown to be the expression of some larger plan. The meaning given them is simple. The facts of class status and inequality were rationalized in the Middle Ages by a functional theory of society, as the facts of competition were rationalized in the eighteenth by the theory of economic harmonies; and the former took the same delight in contemplating the moral purpose revealed in social organization, as the latter in proving that to the curious mechanism of human society a moral purpose was superfluous or disturbing. Society, like the human body, is an organism composed of different members. Each member has its own function, prayer, or defence, or merchandise, or tilling the soil. Each must receive the means suited to its station, and must claim no more. Within classes there must be equality; if one takes into his hand the living of two, his neighbour will go short. Between classes there must be inequality; for otherwise a class cannot perform its function, or – a strange thought to us – enjoy its rights. Peasants must not encroach on those above them. Lords must not despoil peasants. Craftsmen and merchants must receive what will maintain them in their calling, and no more.

As a rule of social policy, the doctrine was at once repressive and protective. ‘There is degree above degree, as reason is, and skill it is that men do their devoir thereas it is due. But certes, extortions and despite of your underlings is damnable.’¹⁴ As a philosophy of society, it attempted to spiritualize the material by incorporating it in a divine universe, which should absorb and transform it. To that process of transmutation the life of mere money-making was recalcitrant, and hence, indeed, the stigma attached to it. For, in spite of the ingenuity of theorists, finance and trade, the essence of which seemed to be, not service, but a mere appetitus divitiarum infinitus, were not easily interpreted in terms of social function. Comparatively late intruders in a world dominated by conceptions hammered out in a pre-commercial age, they were never fitted harmoniously into the medieval synthesis, and ultimately, when they grew to their full stature, were to contribute to its overthrow. But the property of the feudal lord, the labour of the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity of the warrior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life of the spirit. Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were to be sublimated into service, vocation, and chivalry, and the ritual which surrounded them was designed to emphasize that they had undergone a rededication at the hands of religion. Baptized by the Church, privilege and power became office and duty.

That the reconciliation was superficial, and that in attempting it the Church often degraded itself without raising the world, is as indisputable as that its tendency was to dignify material interests, by stamping them with the impress of a universal design. Gentlemen took hard tallages and oppressed the poor; but it was something that they should be told that their true function was ‘to defend God’s law by power of the world’.¹⁵ Craftsmen – the burden of endless sermons – worked deceitfully; but it was perhaps not wholly without value that they should pay even lip-service to the ideal of so conducting their trade that the common people should not be defrauded by the evil ingenuity of those exercising the craft. If lord and peasant, merchant and artisan, burgess and villager, pressed each other hard, was it meaningless to meet their struggles with an assertion of universal solidarity, to which economic convenience and economic power must alike give way? ‘The health of the whole commonwealth will be assured and vigorous, if the higher members consider the lower and the lower answer in like manner the higher, so that each is in its turn a member of every other.’¹⁶

If the medieval moralist was often too naive in expecting sound practice as the result of lofty principles alone, he was at least free from that not unfashionable form of credulity which expects it from their absence or from their opposite. To say that the men to whom such teaching was addressed went out to rob and cheat is to say no more than that they were men. Nor is it self-evident that they would have been more likely to be honest if they had been informed, like some of their descendants, that competition was designed by Providence to provide an automatic substitute for honesty. Society was interpreted, in short, not as the expression of economic self-interest, but as held together by a system of mutual, though varying, obligations. Social well-being exists, it was thought, in so far as each class performs its functions and enjoys the rights proportioned thereto. ‘The Church is divided in these three parts, preachers, and defenders, and … labourers…. As she is our mother, so she is a body, and health of this body stands in this, that one part of her answer to another, after the same measure that Jesus Christ has ordained it…. Kindly man’s hand helps his head, and his eye helps his foot, and his foot his body … and thus should it be in parts of the Church.… As divers parts of man served unkindly to man if one took the service of another and left his own proper work, so divers parts of the Church have proper works to serve God; and if one part leave his work that God has limited him and take work of another part, sinful wonder is in the Church…. Surely the Church shall never be whole before proportions of her parts be brought again by this heavenly leech and (by) medicine of men.’¹⁷

Speculation does not develop in vacuo. It echoes, however radical it is, the established order. Clearly this patriarchal doctrine is a softened reflection of the feudal land system. Not less clearly the Church’s doctrine of economic ethics is the expression of the conditions of medieval industry. A religious philosophy, unless it is frankly to abandon nine-tenths of conduct to the powers of darkness, cannot admit the doctrine of a world of business and economic relations self-sufficient and divorced from ethics and religion. But the facts may be difficult to moralize, or they may be relatively easy. Over a great part of Europe in the later Middle Ages, the economic environment was less intractable than it had been in the days of the Empire or than it is today. In the great commercial centres there was sometimes, it is true, a capitalism as inhuman as any which the world has seen, and from time to time ferocious class wars between artisans and merchants.¹⁸ But outside them trade, industry, the money market, all that we call the economic system, was not a system, but a mass of individual trades and individual dealings. Pecuniary transactions were a fringe on a world of natural economy. There was little mobility or competition. There was very little large-scale organization. With some important exceptions, such as the textile workers of Flanders and Italy, who, in the fourteenth century, again and again rose in revolt, the medieval artisan, especially in backward countries like England, was a small master. The formation of temporary organizations, or ‘parliaments’, of wage-earners, which goes on in London even before the end of the thirteenth century,¹⁹ and the growth of journeymen’s associations in the later Middle Ages, are a proof that the conditions which produced modern trade unionism were not unknown. But even in a great city like Paris the 128 gilds which existed at the end of the thirteenth century appear to have included 5,000 masters, who employed not more than 6,000 to 7,000 journeymen. At Frankfurt-am-Main in 1387 actually not more than 750 to 800 journeymen are estimated to have been in the service of 1,554 masters.²⁰

In cities of this kind, with their freedom, their comparative peace, and their strong corporate feeling, large enough to be prolific of associations and small enough for each man to know his neighbour, an ethic of mutual aid was not wholly impossible, and it is in the light of such conditions that the most characteristic of medieval industrial institutions is to be interpreted. To suggest that anything like a majority of medieval workers were ever members of a craft gild is extravagant. In England, at any rate, more than nine-tenths were peasants, among whom, though friendly societies called gilds were common, there was naturally no question of craft organization. Even in the towns it is a question whether there was not a considerable population of casual workers – consider only the number of unskilled workers that must have been required as labourers by the craftsmen building a cathedral in the days before mechanical cranes – who were rarely organized in permanent societies. To invest the craft gilds with a halo of economic chivalry is not less inappropriate. They were, first and foremost, monopolists, and the cases in which their vested interests came into collision with the consumer were not a few. Wyclif, with his almost modern devotion to the conception of a unitary society overriding particular interests for the common good, was naturally prejudiced against corporations, on the ground that they distracted social unity by the intrusion of sectarian cupidities and sinister ambitions; but there was probably from time to time more than a little justification for his complaint, that ‘all new fraternities or gilds made of men seem openly to run in this curse (against false conspirators)’, because ‘they conspire to bear up each other, yea in wrong, and oppress other men in their right by their wit and power’.²¹ It is significant that the most striking of the projects of political and social reconstruction produced in Germany in the century before the Reformation proposed the complete abolition of gilds, as intolerably corrupt and tyrannical.²²

There are, however, monopolists and monopolists. An age in which combinations are not tempted to pay lip-service to religion may do well to remember that the characteristic, after all, of the medieval gild was that, if it sprang from economic needs, it claimed, at least, to subordinate them to social interests, as conceived by men for whom the social and the spiritual were inextricably intertwined. ‘Tout ce petit monde antique’, writes the historian of French gilds, ‘était fortement imbu des idées chrétiennes sur le juste salaire et le juste prix; sans doute il y avait alors, comme aujourd’hui, des cupidités et des convoitises; mais une regie puissante s’imposait à tous et d’une manière gènèrale exigeait pour chacun le pain quotidien promis par l’Évangile.’²³ The attempt to preserve a rough equality among ‘the good men of the mistery’, to check economic egotism by insisting that every brother shall share his good fortune with another and stand by his neighbour in need, to resist the encroachments of a conscienceless money-power, to preserve professional standards of training and craftsmanship, and to repress by a strict corporate discipline the natural appetite of each to snatch special advantages for himself to the injury of all – whether these things outweigh the evils of conservative methods and corporate exclusiveness is a question which each student will answer in accordance with his own predilections. What is clear, at least, is that both the rules of fraternities and the economic teaching of the Church were prompted by the problems of a common environment. Much that is now mechanical was then personal, intimate, and direct, and there was little room for organization on a scale too vast for the standards that are applied to individuals, or for the doctrine which silences scruples and closes all accounts with the final plea of economic expediency.

Such an environment, with its personal economic relations, was a not unfavourable field for a system of social ethics. And the Church, which brought to its task the tremendous claim to mediate between even the humblest activity and the divine purpose, sought to supply it. True, its teaching was violated in practice, and violated grossly, in the very citadel of Christendom which promulgated it. Contemporaries were under no illusion as to the reality of economic motives in the Age of Faith. They had only to look at Rome. From the middle of the thirteenth century a continuous wail arises against the iniquity of the Church, and its burden may be summed up in one word, ‘avarice’. At Rome, everything is for sale. What is followed is the gospel, not according to St Mark, but according to the marks of silver.²⁴

Cum ad papam veneris, habe pro constanti,

Non est locus pauperi, soli favet danti.

Images

Papa, si rem tangimus, nomen habet a re,

Quicquid habent alii, solus vult papare;

Vel, si verbum gallicum vis apocopare,

‘Payez, payez,’ dit le mot, si vis impetrare.²⁵

The Papacy might denounce usurers, but, as the centre of the most highly organized administrative system of the age, receiving remittances from all over Europe, and receiving them in money at a time when the revenue of other governments still included personal services and payments in kind, it could not dispense with them. Dante put the Cahorsine money-lenders in hell, but a Pope gave them the title of ‘peculiar sons of the Roman Church’.²⁶ Grosstête rebuked the Lombard bankers, and a bishop of London expelled them, but papal protection brought them back.²⁷ Archbishop Peckham, a few years later, had to implore Pope Nicholas III to withdraw a threat of excommunication, intended to compel him to pay the usurious interest demanded by Italian money-lenders, though, as the archbishop justly observed, ‘by your Holiness’s special mandate, it would be my duty to take strong measures against such lenders’.²⁸ The Papacy was, in a sense, the greatest financial institution of the Middle Ages, and, as its fiscal system was elaborated, things became, not better, but worse. The abuses which were a trickle in the thirteenth century were a torrent in the fifteenth. And the frailties of Rome, if exceptional in their notoriety, can hardly be regarded as unique. Priests, it is from time to time complained, engage in trade and take usury.²⁹ Cathedral chapters lend money at high rates of interest. The profits of usury, like those of simony, should have been refused by churchmen as hateful to God; but a bishop of Paris, when consulted by a usurer as to the salvation of his soul, instead of urging restitution, recommended him to dedicate his ill-gotten wealth to the building of Notre-Dame.³⁰ ‘Thus’, exclaimed St Bernard, as he gazed at the glories of Gothic architecture, ‘wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus money bringeth money…. O vanity of vanities, yet no more vain than insane! The Church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked.’³¹

The picture is horrifying, and one must be grateful to those, like M. Luchaire and Mr Coulton, who demolish romance. But the denunciation of vices implies that they are recognized as vicious; to ignore their condemnation is not less one-sided than to conceal their existence; and, when the halo has vanished from practice, it remains to ask what principles men valued and what standards they erected. The economic doctrines elaborated in the Summae of the Schoolmen, in which that question receives its most systematic answer, have not infrequently been dismissed as the fanciful extravagances of writers disqualified from throwing light on the affairs of this world by their morbid preoccupation with those of the next. In reality, whatever may be thought of their conclusions, both the occasion and the purpose of scholastic speculations upon economic questions were eminently practical. The movement which prompted them was the growth of trade, of town life, and of a commercial economy, in a world whose social categories were still those of the self-sufficing village and the feudal hierarchy. The object of their authors was to solve the problems to which such developments gave rise. It was to reconcile the new contractual relations, which sprang from economic expansion, with the traditional morality expounded by the Church. Viewed by posterity as reactionaries, who damned the currents of economic enterprise with an irrelevant appeal to Scripture and to the Fathers, in their own age they were the pioneers of a liberal intellectual movement. By lifting the weight of antiquated formulae, they cleared a space within the stiff framework of religious authority for new and mobile economic interests, and thus supplied an intellectual justification for developments which earlier generations would have condemned.

The mercantilist thought of later centuries owed a considerable debt to scholastic discussions of money, prices, and interest. But the specific contributions of medieval writers to the technique of economic theory were less significant than their premises. Their fundamental assumptions, both of which were to leave a deep imprint on the social thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were two: that economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct upon which, as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding. Material riches are necessary; they have a secondary importance, since without them men cannot support themselves and help one another; the wise ruler, as St Thomas said,³² will consider in founding his State the natural resources of the country. But economic motives are suspect. Because they are powerful appetites, men fear them, but they are not mean enough to applaud them. Like other strong passions, what they need, it is thought, is not a clear field, but repression. There is no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a constant and measurable force, to be accepted, like other natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum, would have appeared to the medieval thinker as hardly less irrational or less immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary human attributes as pugnacity or the sexual instinct. The outer is ordained for the sake of the inner; economic goods are instrumental – sicut quaedam adminicula, quibus adjuvamur ad tendendum in beatitudinem. ‘It is lawful to desire temporal blessings, not putting them in the first place, as though setting up our rest in them, but regarding them as aids to blessedness, inasmuch as they support our corporal life and serve as instruments for acts of virtue.’³³ Riches, as St Antonino says, exist for man, not man for riches.

At every turn, therefore, there are limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs. It is right for a man to seek such wealth as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To seek more is not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a deadly sin. Trade is legitimate: the different resources of different countries show that it was intended by Providence. But it is a dangerous business. A man must be sure that he carries it on for the public benefit, and that the profits which he takes are no more than the wages of his labour. Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen world; men work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are common. But it is to be tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself; the ideal – if only man’s nature could rise to it – is communism. ‘Communis enim,’ wrote Gratian in his Decretum, ‘usus omnium quae sunt in hoc mundo, omnibus hominibus esse debuit.’³⁴ At best, indeed, the estate is somewhat encumbered. It must be legitimately acquired. It must be in the largest possible number of hands. It must provide for the support of the poor. Its use must as far as practicable be common. Its owners must be ready to share it with those who need, even if they are not in actual destitution. Such were the conditions which commended themselves to an archbishop of the business capital of fifteenth-century Europe.³⁵ There have been ages in which they would have been described, not as a justification of property, but as a revolutionary assault on it. For to defend the property of the peasant and small master is necessarily to attack that of the monopolist and usurer, which grows by devouring it.

The assumption on which all this body of doctrine rested was simple. It was that the danger of economic interests increased in direct proportion to the prominence of the pecuniary motives associated with them. Labour – the common lot of mankind – is necessary and honourable; trade is necessary, but perilous to the soul; finance, if not immoral, is at best sordid and at worst disreputable. This curious inversion of the social values of more enlightened ages is best revealed in medieval discussions of the ethics of commerce. The severely qualified tolerance extended to the trader was partly, no doubt, a literary convention derived from classical models; it was natural that Aquinas should laud the State which had small need of merchants because it could meet its needs from the produce of its own soil; had not the philosopher himself praised Images But it was a convention which coincided with a vital element in medieval social theory, and struck a responsive note in wide sections of medieval society. It is not disputed, of course, that trade is indispensable; the merchant supplements the deficiencies of one country with the abundance of another. If there were no private traders, argued Duns Scotus, whose indulgence was less carefully guarded, the governor would have to engage them. Their profits, therefore, are legitimate, and they may include, not only the livelihood appropriate to the trader’s status, but payment for labour, skill, and risk.³⁶

The defence, if adequate, was somewhat embarrassing. For why should a defence be required? The insistence that trade is not positively sinful conveys a hint that the practices of traders may be, at least, of dubious propriety. And so, in the eyes of most medieval thinkers, they are. Summe periculosa est venditionis et emptionis negotiatio.³⁷ The explanation of that attitude lay partly in the facts of contemporary economic organization. The economy of the medieval borough – consider only its treatment of food supplies and prices – was one in which consumption held somewhat the same primacy in the public mind, as the undisputed arbiter of economic effort, as the nineteenth century attached to profits. The merchant pure and simple, though convenient to the Crown, for whom he collected taxes and provided loans, and to great establishments such as monasteries, whose wool he bought in bulk, enjoyed the double unpopularity of an alien and a parasite. The best practical commentary on the tepid indulgence extended by theorists to the trader is the network of restrictions with which medieval policy surrounded his activities, the recurrent storms of public indignation against him, and the ruthlessness with which boroughs suppressed the middleman who intervened between consumer and producer.

Apart, however, from the colour which it took from its environment, medieval social theory had reasons of its own for holding that business, as distinct from labour, required some special justification. The suspicion of economic motives had been one of the earliest elements in the social teaching of the Church, and was to survive till Calvinism endowed the life of economic enterprise with a new sanctification. In medieval philosophy the ascetic tradition, which condemned all commerce as the sphere of iniquity, was softened by a recognition of practical necessities, but it was not obliterated; and, if reluctant to condemn, it was insistent to warn. For it was of the essence of trade to drag into a position of solitary prominence the acquisitive appetites, and towards those appetites, which to most modern thinkers have seemed the one sure social dynamic, the attitude of the medieval theorist was that of one who holds a wolf by the ears. The craftsman labours for his living; he seeks what is sufficient to support him, and no more. The merchant aims not merely at livelihood, but at profit. The traditional distinction was expressed in the words of Gratian: ‘Whosoever buys a thing, not that he may sell it whole and unchanged, but that it may be a material for fashioning something, he is no merchant. But the man who buys it in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God’s temple.’³⁸ By very definition a man who ‘buys in order that he may sell dearer’, the trader is moved by an inhuman concentration on his own pecuniary interest, unsoftened by any tincture of public spirit or private charity. He turns what should be a means into an end, and his occupation, therefore, ‘is justly condemned, since, regarded in itself, it serves the lust of gain’.³⁹

The dilemma presented by a form of enterprise at once perilous to the soul and essential to society was revealed in the solution most commonly propounded for it. It was to treat profits as a particular case of wages, with the qualification that gains in excess of a reasonable remuneration for the merchant’s labour were, though not illegal, reprehensible as turpe lucrum. The condition of the trader’s exoneration is that ‘he seeks gain, not as an end, but as the wages of his labour’.⁴⁰ Theoretically convenient, the doctrine was difficult of application, for evidently it implied the acceptance of what the sedate irony of Adam Smith was later to describe as ‘an affectation not very common among merchants’. But the motives which prompted it were characteristic. The medieval theorist condemned as a sin precisely that effort to achieve a continuous and unlimited increase in material wealth which modern societies applaud as meritorious, and the vices for which he reserved his most merciless denunciations were the more refined and subtle of the economic virtues. ‘He who has enough to satisfy his wants,’ wrote a Schoolman of the fourteenth century, ‘and nevertheless ceaselessly labours to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labour, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance – all such are incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality, or pride.’⁴¹ Two and a half centuries later, in the midst of a revolution in the economic and spiritual environment, Luther, in even more unmeasured language, was to say the same.⁴² The essence of the argument was that payment may properly be demanded by the craftsmen who make the goods, or by the merchants who transport them, for both labour in their vocation and serve the common need. The unpardonable sin is that of the speculator or the middleman, who snatches private gain by the exploitation of public necessities. The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labour theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.

(ii)

The Sin of Avarice

If such ideas were to be more than generalities, they required to be translated into terms of the particular transactions by which trade is conducted and property acquired. Their practical expression was the body of economic casuistry, in which the best-known elements are the teaching with regard to the just price and the prohibition of usury. These doctrines sprang as much from the popular consciousness of the plain facts of the economic situation as from the theorists who expounded them. The innumerable fables of the usurer who was prematurely carried to hell, or whose money turned to withered leaves in his strong box, or who (as the scrupulous recorder remarks) ‘about the year 1240’, on entering a church to be married, was crushed by a stone figure falling from the porch, which proved by the grace of God to be a carving of another usurer and his money-bags being carried off by the devil, are more illuminating than the refinements of lawyers.⁴³

On these matters, as the practice of borough and manor, as well as of national governments, shows, the Church was preaching to the converted, and to dismiss its teaching on economic ethics as the pious rhetoric of professional moralists is to ignore the fact that precisely similar ideas were accepted in circles which would not be suspected of any unnatural squeamishness as to the arts by which men grow rich. The best commentary on ecclesiastical doctrines as to usury and prices is the secular legislation on similar subjects, for, down at least to the middle of the sixteenth century, their leading ideas were reflected in it. Plain men might curse the chicanery of ecclesiastical lawyers, and gilds and boroughs might forbid their members to plead before ecclesiastical courts; but the rules which they themselves made for the conduct of business had more than a flavour of the canon law. Florence was the financial capital of medieval Europe; but even at Florence the secular authorities fined bankers right and left for usury in the middle of the fourteenth century, and fifty years later, first prohibited credit transactions altogether, and then imported Jews to conduct a business forbidden to Christians.⁴⁴ Cologne was one of the greatest of commercial entrepôts; but, when its successful business man came to make his will, he remembered that trade was perilous to the soul and avarice a deadly sin, and offered what atonement he could by directing his sons to make restitution and to follow some less dangerous occupation than that of the merchant.⁴⁵ The burgesses of Coventry fought the Prior over a question of common rights for the best part of a century; but the Court Leet of that thriving business city put usury on a par with adultery and fornication, and decreed that no usurer could become mayor, councillor, or master of the gild.⁴⁶ It was not that laymen were unnaturally righteous; it was not that the Church was all-powerful, though its teaching wound into men’s minds through a hundred channels, and survived as a sentiment long after it was repudiated as a command. It was that the facts of the economic situation imposed themselves irresistibly on both. In reality, there was no sharp collision between the doctrine of the Church and the public policy of the world of business – its individual practice was, of course, another matter – because both were formed by the same environment, and accepted the same broad assumptions as to social expediency.

The economic background of it all was very simple. The medieval consumer – we can sympathize with him today more easily than in 1914 – is like a traveller condemned to spend his life at a station hotel. He occupies a tied house and is at the mercy of the local baker and brewer. Monopoly is inevitable. Indeed, a great part of medieval industry is a system of organized monopolies, endowed with a public status, which must be watched with jealous eyes to see that they do not abuse their powers. It is a society of small masters and peasant farmers. Wages are not a burning question, for, except in the great industrial centres of Italy and Flanders, the permanent wage-earning class is small. Usury is, as it is today in similar circumstances. For loans are made largely for consumption, not for production. The farmer whose harvest fails or whose beasts die, or the artisan who loses money, must have credit, seed-corn, cattle, raw materials, and his distress is the money-lender’s opportunity. Naturally, there is a passionate popular sentiment against the engrosser who holds a town to ransom, the monopolist who brings the livings of many into the hands of one, the money-lender who takes advantage of his neighbours’ necessities to get a lien on their land and foreclose. ‘The usurer would not loan to men these goods, but if he hoped winning, that he loves more than charity. Many other sins be more than this usury, but for this men curse and hate it more than other sin.’⁴⁷

No one who examines the cases actually heard by the courts in the later Middle Ages will think that resentment surprising, for they throw a lurid light on the possibilities of commercial immorality.⁴⁸ Among the peasants and small masters who composed the mass of the population in medieval England, borrowing and lending were common, and it was with reference to their petty transactions, not to the world of high finance, that the traditional attitude towards the money-lender had been crystallized. It was natural that ‘Juetta [who] is a usuress and sells at a dearer rate for accommodation’, and John the Chaplain, qui est usurarius maximus,⁴⁹ should be regarded as figures at once too scandalous to be tolerated by their neighbours and too convenient to be altogether suppressed. The Church accepts this popular sentiment, gives it a religious significance, and crystallizes it in a system, in which economic morality is preached from the pulpit, emphasized in the confessional, and enforced, in the last resource, through the courts.

The philosophical basis of it is the conception of natural law. ‘Every law framed by man bears the character of a law exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the law of nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the law of nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere perversion of law.’⁵⁰ The plausible doctrine of compensations, of the long-run, of the self-correcting mechanism, has not been yet invented. The idea of a law of nature – of natural justice which ought to find expression in positive law, but which is not exhausted in it – supplies an ideal standard by which the equity of particular relations can be measured. The most fundamental difference between medieval and modern economic thought consists, indeed, in the fact that, whereas the latter normally refers to economic expediency, however it may be interpreted, for the justification of any particular action, policy, or system of organization, the former starts from the position that there is a moral authority to which considerations of economic expediency must be subordinated. The practical application of this conception is the attempt to try every transaction by a rule of right, which is largely, though not wholly, independent of the fortuitous combinations of economic circumstances. No man must ask more than the price fixed, either by public authorities, or, failing that, by common estimation. True, prices even so will vary with scarcity; for, with all their rigour, theologians are not so impracticable as to rule out the effect of changing supplies. But they will not vary with individual necessity or individual opportunity. The bugbear is the man who uses, or even creates, a temporary shortage, the man who makes money out of the turn of the market, the man who, as Wyclif says, must be wicked, or he could not have been poor yesterday and rich today.⁵¹

The formal theory of the just price went, it is true, through a considerable development. The dominant conception of Aquinas – that prices, though they will vary with the varying conditions of different markets, should correspond with the labour and costs of the producer, as the proper basis of the communis estimatio, conformity with which was the safeguard against extortion – was qualified by subsequent writers. Several Schoolmen of the fourteenth century emphasized the subjective element in the common estimation, insisted that the essence of value was utility, and drew the conclusion that a fair price was most likely to be reached under freedom of contract, since the mere fact that a bargain had been struck showed that both parties were satisfied.⁵² In the fifteenth century St Antonino, who wrote with a highly-developed commercial civilization beneath his eyes, endeavoured to effect a synthesis, in which the principle of the traditional doctrine should be observed, while the necessary play should be left to economic motives. After a subtle analysis of the conditions affecting value, he concluded that the fairness of a price could at best be a matter only of ‘probability and conjecture’, since it would vary with places, periods, and persons. His practical contribution was to introduce a new elasticity into the whole conception by distinguishing three grades of prices – a gradus pius, discretus, and rigidus. A seller who exceeded the price fixed by more than 50 per cent was bound, he argued, to make restitution, and even a smaller departure from it, if deliberate, required atonement in the shape of alms. But accidental lapses were venial, and there was a debatable ground within which prices might move without involving sin.⁵³

This conclusion, with its recognition of the impersonal forces of the market, was the natural outcome of the intense economic activity of the later Middle Ages, and evidently contained the seeds of an intellectual revolution. The fact that it should have begun to be expounded as early as the middle of the fourteenth century is a reminder that the economic thought of Schoolmen contained elements much more various and much more modern than is sometimes suggested. But the characteristic doctrine was different. It was that which insisted on the just price as the safeguard against extortion. ‘To leave the prices of goods at the discretion of the sellers is to give rein to the cupidity which goads almost all of them to seek excessive gain.’ Prices must be such, and no more than such, as will enable each man to ‘have the necessaries of life suitable for his station’. The most desirable course is that they should be fixed by public officials, after making an inquiry into the supplies available and framing an estimate of the requirements of different classes. Failing that, the individual must fix prices for himself, guided by a consideration of ‘what he must charge in order to maintain his position, and nourish himself suitably in it, and by a reasonable estimate of his expenditure and labour’.⁵⁴ If the latter recommendation was a counsel of perfection, the former was almost a platitude. It was no more than an energetic mayor would carry out before breakfast.

No man, again, may charge money for a loan. He may, of course, take the profits of partnership, provided that he takes the partner’s risks. He may buy a rent-charge; for the fruits of the earth are produced by nature, not wrung from man. He may demand compensation – interesse – if he is not repaid the principal at the time stipulated. He may ask payment corresponding to any loss he incurs or gain he forgoes. He may purchase an annuity, for the payment is contingent and speculative, not certain. It is no usury when John Deveneys, who has borrowed £19 16s., binds himself to pay a penalty of £40 in the event of failure to restore the principal, for this is compensation for damages incurred; or when Geoffrey de Eston grants William de Burwode three marks of silver in return for an annual rent of six shillings, for this is the purchase of a rent-charge, not a loan; or when James le Reve of London advances £100 to Robert de Bree of Dublin, merchant, with which to trade for two years in Ireland, for this is a partnership; or when the Priory of Worcester sells annuities for a capital sum paid down.⁵⁵ What remained to the end unlawful was that which appears in modern economic text-books as ‘pure-interest’ – interest as a fixed payment stipulated in advance for a loan of money or wares without risk to the lender: ‘Usura est ex mutuo lucrum pacto debitum vel exactum … quidquid sorti accedit, subaudi per pactum vel exactionem, usura est, quodcunque nomen sibi imponat.’⁵⁶ The emphasis was on pactum. The essence of usury was that it was certain, and that, whether the borrower gained or lost, the usurer took his pound of flesh. Medieval opinion, which has no objection to rent or profits, provided that they are reasonable – for is not everyone in a small way a profit-maker? – has no mercy for the debenture-holder. His crime is that he takes a payment for money which is fixed and certain, and such a payment is usury.

The doctrine was, of course, more complex and more subtle than a bald summary suggests. With the growth of the habit of investment, of a market for capital, and of new forms of economic enterprise such as insurance and exchange business, theory became steadily more elaborate and schools more sharply divided. The precise meaning and scope of the indulgence extended to the purchase of rent-charges produced one controversy, the foreign exchanges another, the development of Monts de Piété a third. Even before the end of the fourteenth century there had been writers who argued that interest was the remuneration of the services rendered by the lender, and who pointed out (though apparently they did not draw the modern corollary) that present are more valuable than future goods.⁵⁷ But on the iniquity of payment merely for the act of lending, theological opinion, whether liberal or conservative, was unanimous, and its modern interpreter,⁵⁸ who sees in its indulgence to interesse the condonation of interest, would have created a scandal in theological circles in any age before that of Calvin. To take usury is contrary to Scripture; it is contrary to Aristotle; it is contrary to nature, for it is to live without labour; it is to sell time, which belongs to God, for the advantage of wicked men; it is to rob those who use the money lent, and to whom, since they make it profitable, the profits should belong; it is unjust in itself, for the benefit of the loan to the borrower cannot exceed the value of the principal sum lent him; it is in defiance of sound juristic principles, for when a loan of money is made, the property in the thing lent passes to the borrower, and why should the creditor demand payment from a man who is merely using what is now his own?

The part played by authority in all this is obvious. There were the texts in Exodus and Leviticus; there was Luke vi. 35 – apparently a mistranslation; there was a passage in the Politics, which some now say was mistranslated also.⁵⁹ But practical considerations contributed more to the doctrine than is sometimes supposed. Its character had been given it in an age in which most loans were not part of a credit system, but an exceptional expedient, and in which it could be said that ‘he who borrows is always under stress of necessity’. If usury were general, it was argued, ‘men would not give thought to the cultivation of their land, except when they could do nought else, and so there would be so great a famine that all the poor would die of hunger: for even if they could get land to cultivate, they would not be able to get the beasts and implements for cultivating it, since the poor themselves would not have them, and the rich, for the sake both of profit and of security, would put their money into usury rather than into smaller and more risky investments’.⁶⁰ The man who used these arguments was not an academic dreamer. He was Innocent IV, a consummate man of business, a believer, even to excess, in Realpolitik, and one of the ablest statesmen of his day.

True, the Church could not dispense with commercial wickedness in high places. It was too convenient. The distinction between pawnbroking, which is disreputable, and high finance, which is eminently honourable, was as familiar in the Age of Faith as in the twentieth century; and no reasonable judgement of the medieval denunciation of usury is possible unless it is remembered that whole ranges of financial business escaped from it almost altogether. It was rarely applied to the large-scale transactions of kings, feudal magnates, bishops, and abbots. Their subjects, squeezed to pay a foreign-money-lender, might grumble or rebel, but, if an Edward III or a Count of Champagne was in the hands of financiers, who could bring either debtor or creditor to book? It was even more rarely applied to the Papacy itself; Popes regularly employed the international banking-houses of the day, with a singular indifference, as was frequently complained, to the morality of their business methods, took them under their special protection, and sometimes enforced the payment of debts by the threat of excommunication. As a rule, in spite of some qualms, the international money-market escaped from the ban on usury; in the fourteenth century Italy was full of banking-houses doing foreign exchange business in every commercial centre from Constantinople to London, and in the great fairs, such as those of Champagne, a special period was regularly set aside for the negotiation of loans and the settlement of debts.⁶¹

It was not that transactions of this type were expressly excepted; on the contrary, each of them from time to time evoked the protests of moralists. Nor was it mere hypocrisy which caused the traditional doctrine to be repeated by writers who were perfectly well aware that neither commerce nor government could be carried on without credit. It was that the whole body of intellectual assumptions and practical interests, on which the prohibition of usury was based, had reference to a quite different order of economic activities from that represented by loans from great banking-houses to the merchants and potentates who were their clients. Its object was simple and direct – to prevent the well-to-do money-lender from exploiting the necessities of the peasant or the craftsman; its categories, which were quite appropriate to that type of transaction, were those of personal morality. It was in these commonplace dealings among small men that oppression was easiest and its results most pitiable. It was for them that the Church’s scheme of economic ethics had been worked out, and with reference to them, though set at naught in high places, it was meant to be enforced, for it was part of Christian charity.

It was enforced partly by secular authorities, partly, in so far as the rivalry of secular authorities would permit it, by the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. The ecclesiastical legislation on the subject of usury has been so often analysed that it is needless to do more than allude to it. Early Councils had forbidden usury to be taken by the clergy.⁶² The Councils of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries forbid it to be taken by clergy or laity, and lay down rules for dealing with offenders. Clergy who lend money to persons in need, take their possessions in pawn, and receive profits beyond the capital sum lent, are to be deprived of their office.⁶³ Manifest usurers are not to be admitted to communion or Christian burial; their offerings are not to be accepted; and ecclesiastics who fail to punish them are to be suspended until they make satisfaction to their bishop.⁶⁴ The high-water mark of the ecclesiastical attack on usury was probably reached in the legislation of the Councils of Lyons (1274) and of Vienne (1312). The former re-enacted the measures laid down by the third Lateran Council (1175), and supplemented them by rules which virtually made the money-lender an outlaw. No individual or society, under pain of excommunication or interdict, was to let houses to usurers, but was to expel them (had they been admitted) within three months. They were to be refused confession, absolution, and Christian burial until they had made restitution, and their wills were to be invalid.⁶⁵ The legislation of the Council of Vienne was even more sweeping. Declaring that it has learned with dismay that there are communities which, contrary to human and divine law, sanction usury and compel debtors to observe usurious contracts, it declares that all rulers and magistrates knowingly maintaining such laws are to incur excommunication, and requires the legislation in question to be revoked within three months. Since the true nature of usurious transactions is often concealed beneath various specious devices, money-lenders are to be compelled by the ecclesiastical authorities to submit their accounts to examination. Any person obstinately declaring that usury is not a sin is to be punished as a heretic, and inquisitors are to proceed against him tanquam contra diffamatos vel suspectos de haeresi.⁶⁶

It would not be easy to find a more drastic example, either of ecclesiastical sovereignty, or of the attempt to assert the superiority of the moral law to economic expediency, than the requirement, under threat of excommunication, that all secular legislation sanctioning usury shall be repealed. But, for an understanding of the way in which the system was intended to work, the enactments of Councils are perhaps less illuminating than the correspondence between the papal Curia and subordinate ecclesiastical authorities on specific cases and questions of interpretation. Are the heirs of those who have made money by usury bound to, make restitution? Yes, the same penalties are to be applied to them as to the original offenders. The pious object of ransoming prisoners is not to justify the asking of a price for a loan. A man is to be accounted a usurer, not only if he charges interest, but if he allows for the element of time in a bargain, by asking a higher price when he sells on credit. Even when debtors have sworn not to proceed against usurers, the ecclesiastical authorities are to compel the latter to restore their gains, and, if witnesses are terrorized by the protection given to usurers by the powerful, punishment can be imposed without their evidence, provided that the offence is a matter of common notoriety. An archbishop of Canterbury is reminded that usury is perilous, not only for the clergy, but for all men whatever, and is warned to use ecclesiastical censures to secure the restoration, without the deduction of interest, of property which has been pawned. Usurers, says a papal letter to the archbishop of Salerno, object to restoring gains, or say that they have not the means; he is to compel all who can to make restitution, either to those from whom interest was taken, or to their heirs; when neither course is possible, they are to give it to the poor; for, as Augustine says, non remittitur peccatum, nisi restituitur ablatum. At Genoa, the Pope is informed, a practice obtains of undertaking to pay, at the end of a given term, a higher price for wares than they were worth at the moment when the sale took place. It is not clear that such contracts are necessarily usurious; nevertheless, the sellers run into sin unless there is a probability that the wares will have changed in value by the time that payment is made; ‘and therefore your fellow-citizens would show a wise regard for their salvation if they ceased making contracts of the kind, since the thoughts of men cannot be concealed from Almighty God’.⁶⁷

It is evident from the number of doubtful cases referred to Rome for decision that the law with regard to usury was not easily administered. It is evident, also, that efforts were made to offer guidance in dealing with difficult and technical problems. In the book of common forms, drawn up in the thirteenth century for the guidance of the papal penitentiary in dealing with hard cases, precedents were inserted to show how usurers should be handled.⁶⁸ About the same time appeared St Raymond’s guide to the duties of an archdeacon, which contains a long list of inquiries to be made on visitation, covering every conceivable kind of extortion, and designed to expose the various illusory contracts – fictitious partnerships, loans under the guise of sales, excessive deposits against advances – by which the offence was concealed.⁶⁹ Instructions to confessors define in equal detail the procedure to be followed. The confessor, states a series of synodal statutes, is to ‘make inquiry concerning merchandising, and other things pertaining to avarice and covetousness’. Barons and knights are to be required to state whether they have made ordinances contrary to the liberty of the Church, or refused justice to any man seeking it, or oppressed their subjects with undue tallages, tolls, or services. ‘Concerning burgesses, merchants, and officers (ministrales) the priest is to make inquiry as to rapine, usury, pledges made by deceit of usury, barratry, false and lying sales, unjust weights and measures, lying, perjury, and craft. Concerning cultivators (agricolas) he is to inquire as to theft and detention of the property of others, especially with regard to tithes … also as to the removing of landmarks and the occupation of other men’s land…. Concerning avarice it is to be asked in this wise: hast thou been guilty of simony … an unjust judge … a thief, a robber, a perjurer, sacrilegious man, a gambler, a remover of landmarks in fields … a false merchant, an oppressor of any man and above all of widows, wards, and others in misery for the sake of unjust and greedy gain?’ Those guilty of avarice are to do penance by giving large alms, on the principle that ‘contraries are to be cured with contraries’. But there are certain sins for which no true penitence is possible until restitution has been made. Of these usury is one; and usury, it is to be noted, includes, not only what would now be called interest, but the sin of those who, on account of lapse of time, sell dearer and buy cheaper. If for practical reasons restitution is impossible, the offender is to be instructed to require that it shall be made by his heirs, and, when the injured party cannot be found, the money is to be spent, with the advice of the bishop if the sum is large and of the priest if it is small, ‘on pious works and especially on the poor’.⁷⁰

The more popular teaching on the subject is illustrated by the manuals for use in the confessional and by books for the guidance of the devout. The space given in them to the ethics of business was considerable. In the fifteenth century Bishop Pecock could meet the Lollards’ complaint that the Scriptures were buried beneath a mass of interpretation by taking as his illustration the books which had been written on the text ‘Lend, hoping for nothing again’, and arguing that all this teaching upon usury was little enough ‘to answer … all the hard, scrupulous doubts and questions which all day have need to be assoiled in men’s bargains and chafferings together’.⁷¹ A century later there were regions in which such doctrine was still being rehearsed with all the old rigour. In 1552 the Parliament which made the Scottish Reformation was only eight years off. But the catechism of the Archbishop of St Andrews, which was drawn up in that year, shows no disposition to compromise with the economic frailties of his fellow-countrymen. It denounces usurers, masters who withhold wages, covetous merchants who sell fraudulent wares, covetous landlords who grind their tenants, and in general – a comprehensive and embarrassing indictment – ‘all wretches that will be grown rich incontinent’, and all ‘who may keep their neighbour from poverty and mischance and do it not’.⁷²

On the crucial question, how the ecclesiastical courts dealt in practice with these matters, we have very little light. They are still almost an unworked field. On the Continent we catch glimpses of occasional raids. Bishops declare war on notorious usurers, only to evoke reprisals from the secular authorities, to whom the money-lender is too convenient to be victimized by anyone but themselves.⁷³ At the end of the thirteenth century an archbishop of Bourges makes some thirty-five usurers disgorge at a sitting,⁷⁴ and seventy years later an inquisitor at Florence collects 7,000 florins in two years from usurers and blasphemers.⁷⁵ In England commercial morality was a debatable land, in which ecclesiastical and secular authorities contended from time to time for jurisdiction. The ecclesiastical courts claimed to deal with cases of breach of contract in general, on the ground that they involved laesio fidei, and with usury in particular, as an offence against morality specifically forbidden by the canon law. Both claims were contested by the Crown and by municipal bodies. The former, by the Constitutions of Clarendon,⁷⁶ had expressly reserved proceedings as to debts for the royal courts, and the same rule was laid down more than once in the course of the next century. The latter again and again forbade burgesses to take proceedings in the courts christian, and fined those who disregarded the prohibition.⁷⁷ Both, in spite of repeated protests from the clergy,⁷⁸ made good their pretension to handle usurious contracts in secular courts; but neither succeeded in ousting the jurisdiction of the Church. The question at issue was not whether the usurer should be punished – a point as to which there was only one opinion – but who should have the lucrative business of punishing him, and in practice he ran the gauntlet of all and of each. Local authorities, from the City of London to the humblest manorial court, make bye-laws against ‘unlawful chevisance’ and present offenders against them.⁷⁹ The Commons pray that Lombard brokers may be banished, and that the ordinances of London concerning them may be made of general application.⁸⁰ The justices in eyre hear indictments of usurers,⁸¹ and the Court of Chancery handles petitions from victims who can get no redress at common law.⁸² And Holy Church, though there seems to be only one example of legislation on the subject by an English Church Council,⁸³ continues to deal with the usurer after her own manner.

For, in spite of the conflict of jurisdictions, the rising resentment against the ways of ecclesiastical lawyers, and the expanding capitalism of the later Middle Ages, it is evident that commercial cases continued, on occasion at least, to come before the courts christian. Nor, after the middle of the fourteenth century, was their right to try cases of usury contested by the secular authorities. A statute of 1341 enacted that (as laid down long before) the King should have cognizance of usurers dead, and the Church of usurers living. The same reservation of ecclesiastical rights was repeated when the question was taken up a century later under Henry VII, and survived, an antiquated piece of common form, even into the age of lusty capitalism under Elizabeth and James I.⁸⁴

That ecclesiastical authorities had much opportunity of enforcing the canon law in connexion with money-lending is improbable. It was naturally in the commercial towns that cases of the kind most frequently arose, and the towns did not look with favour on the interference of churchmen in matters of business. In London, collisions between the courts of the Official, the Mayor, and the King were frequent in the early thirteenth century. Men took proceedings before the first, it seems, when a speedy decision was desired, or when their case was of a kind which secular courts were not likely to regard with favour. Thus craftsmen, to give one curious example out of many, were evidently using the courts christian as a means of giving effect to trade union regulations, which were more likely to be punished than enforced by the mayor and aldermen, by the simple device of imposing an oath and proceeding against those who broke it for breach of faith. The smiths, for instance, made a ‘confederacy’, supported by an oath, with the object, as they declared, of putting down night-work, but, as was alleged in court, of preventing any but members of their organization from working at the trade, and summoned blacklegs before the ecclesiastical courts. The spurriers forbade anyone to work between sunset and sunrise, and haled an offending journeyman before the archdeacon, with the result that ‘the said Richard, after being three times warned by the Official, had been expelled from the Church and excommunicated, until he would swear to keep the ordinance’.⁸⁵

Even at a later period the glimpses which we catch of the activities of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction are enough to show that it was not wholly a dead letter. Priests accused of usury undergo correction at the hands of their bishops.⁸⁶ Petitioners appeal for redress to the Court of Chancery on the ground that they have failed to secure justice in the courts of bishops or archdeacons, where actions on cases of debts or usury have been begun before ‘spiritual men’.⁸⁷ The records of ecclesiastical courts show that, though sometimes commercial questions were dismissed as belonging to the secular courts, cases of breach of contract and usury continued, nevertheless, to be settled by them.⁸⁸ The disreputable family of Marcroft – William the father was a common usurer, Alice his daughter baked bread at Pentecost, and Edward his son made a shirt on All Saints’ Day – is punished by the ecclesiastical court of Whalley as it deserves.⁸⁹ At Ripon a usurer and his victim are induced to settle the case out of court.⁹⁰ The Commissary of London cites Thomas Hall super crimine usurariae pravitatis, on the ground that, having advanced four shillings on the security of Thomas Foster’s belt, he had demanded twelve pence over and above the principal, and suspends him when he does not appear in court.⁹¹ Nor did business of this kind cease with the Reformation. Cases of usury were being heard by ecclesiastical courts under Elizabeth, and even in a great commercial centre like the City of London it was still possible in the reign of James I for the Bishop’s Commissary to be trying tradesmen for ‘lending upon pawnes for an excessive gain’.⁹²

It was not only by legal penalties, however, that an attempt was made to raise a defensive barrier against the exactions of the money-lender. From a very early date there was a school of opinion which held that, in view of the various stratagems by which usurious contracts could be ‘coloured’, direct prohibition was almost necessarily impotent, and which favoured the policy of providing facilities for borrowing on more reasonable terms than could be obtained from the money-lender. Ecclesiastics try, in fact, to turn the flank of the usurer by establishing institutions where the poor can raise capital cheaply. Parishes, religious fraternities, gilds, hospitals, and perhaps monasteries, lend corn, cattle, and money.⁹³ In England bishops are organizing such loans with papal approval in the middle of the thirteenth century,⁹⁴ and two centuries later, about 1462, the Franciscans lead the movement for the creation of Monts de Piété which, starting in Italy, spread by the first half of the sixteenth century to France, Germany, and the Low Countries, and, though never taken up in England – for the Reformation intervened – supplied a topic of frequent comment and eulogy to English writers on economic ethics.⁹⁵ The canon law on the subject of money-lending underwent a steady development, caused by the necessity of adapting it to the increasing complexity of business organization, down at least to the Lateran Council of 1515. The ingenuity with which professional opinion elaborated the code was itself a proof that considerable business – and fees – were the result of it, for lawyers do not serve God for naught. The canonists, who had a bad reputation with the laity, were not, to put it mildly, more innocent than other lawyers in the gentle art of making business. The Italians, in particular, as was natural in the financial capital of Europe, made the pace, and Italian canonists performed prodigies of legal ingenuity. In England, on the other hand, either because Englishmen were unusually virtuous, or, as a foreigner unkindly said, because ‘they do not fear to make contracts on usury’,⁹⁶ or, most probably, because English business was a conservative and slow-going affair, the English canonist Lyndwood is content to quote a sentence from an English archbishop of the thirteenth century and to leave it at that.⁹⁷

But, however lawyers might distinguish and refine, the essential facts were simple. The Church sees buying and selling, lending and borrowing, as a simple case of neighbourly or unneighbourly conduct. Though a rationalist like Bishop Pecock may insist that the rich, as such, are not hateful to God,⁹⁸ it has a traditional prejudice against the arts by which men – or at least laymen – acquire riches, and is apt to lump them together under the ugly name of avarice. Merchants who organize a ring, or money-lenders who grind the poor, it regards not as business strategists, but as nefandae belluae – monsters of iniquity. As for grocers and victuallers ‘who conspire wickedly together that none shall sell better cheap than another’, and speculators ‘who buy up corn, meat, and wine … to amass money at the cost of others’, they are, ‘according to the laws of the Church, no better than common criminals’.⁹⁹ So, when the price of bread rises, or when the London fruiterers, persuaded by one bold spirit that they are ‘all poor and caitiffs on account of their own simplicity, and if they would act on his advice they would be rich and powerful’,¹⁰⁰ form a combine, to the great loss and hardship of the people, burgesses and peasants do not console themselves with the larger hope that the laws of supply and demand may bring prices down again. Strong in the approval of all good Christians, they stand the miller in the pillory, and reason with the fruiterers in the court of the mayor. And the parish priest delivers a sermon on the sixth commandment, choosing as his text the words of the Book of Proverbs, ‘Give me neither riches not poverty, but enough for my sustenance.’

(iii)

The Ideal and the Reality

Such, in brief outline, was the background of economic thought which the sixteenth century inherited, and which it brought to the bewildering changes in land tenure, in prices, in commercial and financial organization, that made the age a watershed in economic development. It is evident that the whole implication of this philosophy was, on one side, intensely conservative. There was no question of progress, still less of any radical social reconstruction. In the numerous heretical movements of the Middle Ages social aspirations were often combined with criticisms of the luxury and pomp of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The official Church, to which independence of thought among the lower orders was but little less abhorrent when it related to their temporal well-being than when it was concerned with their eternal salvation, frowned upon these dangerous speculations, and sometimes crushed them with a ferocity as relentless as the most savage of the White Terrors of modern history has shown to the most formidable of insurrections.

Intellectually, religious opinion endorsed to the full the static view, which regarded the social order as a thing unalterable, to be accepted, not to be improved. Except on rare occasions, its spokesmen repeated the conventional doctrine, according to which the feet were born to labour, the hands to fight, and the head to rule. Naturally, therefore, they denounced agitations, like the communal movement,¹⁰¹ designed to overturn that natural order, though the rise of the Free Cities was one of the glories of medieval Europe and the germ of almost every subsequent advance in civilization. They referred to questions of economic conduct, not because they were anxious to promote reforms, but because they were concerned with the maintenance of traditional standards of personal morality, of which economic conduct formed an important part.

Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest, implicated to the hilt in the economic fabric, especially on the side of agriculture and land tenure. Itself the greatest of landowners, it could no more quarrel with the feudal structure than the Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest of mineral owners today, can lead a crusade against royalties. The persecution of the Spiritual Franciscans, who dared, in defiance of the bull of John XXII, to maintain St Francis’ rule as to evangelical poverty, suggests that doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church.

The basis of the whole medieval economic system, under which, except in Italy and Flanders, more than nine-tenths of the population consisted of agriculturalists, had been serfdom or villeinage. Confronted in the sixteenth century with the unfamiliar evils of competitive agriculture, conservative reformers were to sigh for the social harmonies of a vanished age, which ‘knyt suche a knott of colaterall amytie betwene the Lordes and the tenaunts that the Lorde tendered his tenaunt as his childe, and the tenaunts againe loved and obeyed the Lorde as naturellye as the childe the father’.¹⁰² Their idealization of the past is illuminating as a comment upon their own age, but as an account of the conditions of previous centuries it is misleading. In reality, so far as the servile tenants, who formed the bulk of medieval agriculturalists, were concerned, the golden age of peasant prosperity is, except here and there, a romantic myth, at which no one would have been more surprised than the peasants themselves. The very essence of feudal property was exploitation in its most naked and shameless form, including, as it did, compulsory labour, additional corvées at the very moments when the peasant’s labour was most urgently needed on his own holding, innumerable dues and payments, the obligation to grind at the lord’s mill and bake at the lord’s oven, the private justice of the lord’s court. The custom of the manor, the scarcity of labour, and, in England, the steadily advancing encroachments of the royal courts, blunted the edge of the system, and in fifteenth-century England a prosperous yeomanry was rising on its ruins. But, during the greater part of the Middle Ages, its cumulative weight had been, nevertheless, immense. Those who lived under it had no illusions as to its harshness. The first step which the peasant who had saved a little money took was to buy himself out of the obligation to work on the lord’s demesne. The Peasants’ Revolt in England, the Jacquerie in France, and the repeated risings of the German peasantry reveal a state of social exasperation which has been surpassed in bitterness by few subsequent movements.

It is natural to ask (though some writers on medieval economics refrain from asking), what the attitude of religious opinion was towards serfdom. And it is hardly possible to answer that question except by saying that, apart from a few exceptional individuals, religious opinion ignored it. True, the Church condemned arbitrary tallages, and urged that the serf should be treated with humanity. True, it described the manumission of serfs as an act of piety, like gifts to the poor. For serfs are not ‘living tools’, but men; in the eyes of God all men are serfs together, conservi, and in the Kingdom of Heaven Lazarus is before Dives.¹⁰³ True, villeinage was a legal, not an economic, category; in the England of the fourteenth century there were serfs who were rich men. But to release the individual is not to condemn the institution. Whatever ‘mad priests’ might say and do, the official Church, whose wealth consisted largely of villeins, walked with circumspection.

The canon law appears to have recognized and enforced serfdom.¹⁰⁴ Few prominent ecclesiastics made any pronouncement against it. Aquinas explains it as the result of sin, but that does not prevent his justifying it on economic grounds.¹⁰⁵ Almost all medieval writers appear to assume it or excuse it. Ecclesiastical landlords, though perhaps somewhat more conservative in their methods, seem as a whole to have been neither better nor worse than other landlords. Rustica gens optima flens, pessima gaudens, was a sentiment which sometimes appealed, it is to be feared, to the children of light concerned with rent rolls and farming profits, not less than to the feudal aristocracy, with whom the heads of the ecclesiastical hierarchy were inextricably intermingled. When their chance came, John Nameless, and John the Miller, and John Carter, who may be presumed to have known their friends, burned the court rolls of an abbot of St Albans, and cut off the head of an archbishop, and ran riot on the estates of an abbot of Kempten, with not less enthusiasm than they showed in plundering their lay exploiters. It was not the Church, but revolting peasants in Germany and England, who appealed to the fact that ‘Christ has made all men free’;¹⁰⁶ and in Germany, at least, their ecclesiastical masters showed small mercy to them. The disappearance of serfdom – and, after all, it did not disappear from France till late in the eighteenth century, and from Germany till the nineteenth – was part of a general economic movement, with which the Church had little to do, and which churchmen, as property-owners, had sometimes resisted. It owed less to Christianity than to the humanitarian liberalism of the French Revolution.

The truth was that the very triumph of the Church closed its mouth. The Church of the third century, a minority of believers confronted with an alien civilization, might protest and criticize. But, when the whole leaven was mixed with the lump, when the Church was regarded, not as a society, but as society itself, it was inevitably diluted by the mass which it absorbed. The result was a compromise – a compromise of which the critic can say: ‘How much that was intolerable was accepted!’ and the eulogist: ‘How much that was intolerable was softened!’

Both critic and eulogist are right. For, if religious opinion acquiesced in much, it also claimed much, and the habit of mind which made the medieval Church almost impotent when dealing with the serried abuses of the medieval land system was precisely that which made it strong, at least in theory, in dealing with the economic transactions of the individual. In the earlier Middle Ages it had stood for the protection of peaceful labour, for the care of the poor, the unfortunate, and the oppressed – for the ideal, at least, of social solidarity against the naked force of violence and oppression. With the growing complexity of economic civilization, it was confronted with problems not easily handled by its traditional categories. But, if applied capriciously, they were not renounced, and the world of economic morality, which baffles us today, was in its turn converted by it into a new, though embarrassing, opportunity. Whatever emphasis may be laid – and emphasis can hardly be too strong – upon the gulf between theory and practice, the qualifications stultifying principles, and the casuistry by which the work of canonists, not less than of other lawyers, was disfigured, the endeavour to draw the most commonplace of human activities and the least tractable of human appetites within the all-embracing circle of a universal system still glows through it all with a certain tarnished splendour. When the distinction between that which is permissible in private life and that which is permissible in business offers so plausible an escape from the judgement pronounced on covetousness, it is something to have insisted that the law of charity is binding on the second not less than on the first. When the austerity of principles can be evaded by treating them as applicable only to those relations of life in which their application is least exacting, it is something to have attempted to construct a system tough enough to stand against commercial unscrupulousness, but yet sufficiently elastic to admit any legitimate transaction. If it is proper to insist on the prevalence of avarice and greed in high places, it is not less important to observe that men called these vices by their right names, and had not learned to persuade themselves that greed was enterprise and avarice economy.

Such antitheses are tempting, and it is not surprising that some writers should have dwelt upon them. To a generation disillusioned with free competition, and disposed to demand some criterion of social expediency more cogent than the verdict of the market, the jealous and cynical suspicion of economic egotism, which was the prevalent mood of the Middle Ages, is more intelligible than it was to the sanguine optimists of the Age of Reason, which, as far as its theory of the conduct of men in society is concerned, deserves much more than the thirteenth century to be described as the Age of Faith. In the twentieth century, with its trusts and combines, its control of industry by business and of both by finance, its attempts to fix fair wages and fair prices, its rationing and food controls and textile controls, the economic harmonies are, perhaps, a little blown upon. The temper in which it approaches questions of economic organization appears to have more affinity with the rage of the medieval burgess at the uncharitable covetousness of the usurer and the engrosser than it has with the confidence reposed by its innocent grandfathers in the infallible operations of the invisible hand.

The resemblance, however, though genuine, is superficial, and to over-emphasize it is to do less than justice to precisely those elements in medieval thought which were most characteristic. The significance of its contribution does not consist in its particular theories as to prices and interest, which recur in all ages, whenever the circumstances of the economic environment expose consumer and borrower to extortion. It is to be found in the insistence of medieval thinkers that society is a spiritual organism, not an economic machine, and that economic activity, which is one subordinate element within a vast and complex unity, requires to be controlled and repressed by reference to the moral ends for which it supplies the material means. So merciless is the tyranny of economic appetites, so prone to self-aggrandizement the empire of economic interests, that a doctrine which confines them to their proper sphere, as the servant, not the master, of civilization, may reasonably be regarded as among the pregnant truisms which are a permanent element in any sane philosophy. Nor is it, perhaps, as clear today as it seemed a century ago, that it has been an unmixed gain to substitute the criterion of economic expediency, so easily interpreted in terms of quantity and mass, for the conception of a rule of life superior to individual desires and temporary exigencies, which was what the medieval theorist meant by ‘natural law’.

When all is said, the fact remains that, on the small scale involved, the problem of moralizing economic life was faced and not abandoned. The experiment may have been impracticable, and almost from the first it was discredited by the notorious corruption of ecclesiastical authorities, who preached renunciation and gave a lesson in greed. But it had in it something of the heroic, and to ignore the nobility of the conception is not less absurd than to idealize its practical results. The best proof of the appeal which the attempt to subordinate economic interests to religion had made is the persistence of the same attempt among reformers, to whom the Pope was anti-Christ and the canon law an abomination, and the horror of decent men when, in the sixteenth century, its breakdown became too obvious to be contested.