29.Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the. Forging of Britain (New York and London: Pegasus Books, nd), Kindle ed., chapters 1 and 3; Davis, “The Ethics of Arbitrage.”; Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants; O’Carroll, A Thirteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, 5; Little, Religious Poverty, 69; Hunt and Murray, The History of Business in Medieval Europe, 72; Eugene III, Quantum praedecessores, Dec. 1. 1145 reprinted in Jonathan Phillips, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), Appendix I; Introduction to Peter the Venerable, Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews in The Fathers of the Church: Medieval Continuation, trans. Irven M. Resnick (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), https://books.google.com/books?id=-TmKvbusGjkC&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq=peter+the+venerable+to+king+louis&source=bl&ots=zsr32tmJQ7&sig=9U2bkLKzoDP7DDrrj9ls40DAUbk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=eO3oVIS6M4qUNrLDg_AE&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=peter%20the%20venerable%20to%20king%20louis&f=false; Duby, The Early Expansion of the European Economy, 231.
30.Priscilla Heath Barnum, Dives and Pauper, vol. II (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 262; Cowell, At Play in the Tavern, 60; Golb, The Jews of Medieval Normandy, 201; Introduction to Peter the Venerable, Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews; Little, Religious Poverty, 69.
31.Koyama, “Evading,” 2; Shatzmiller, Cultural Exchange, 8, 9; Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda, ed. J. G. Rokewode (London 1840), 2, in Cave and Coulson, Sourcebook ←21 | 22→←22 | 23→←23 | 24→for Medieval Economic History, 175–76; Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, 218.
32.Shatzmiller, Cultural Exchange, 27, 28, 31, 33–36, 71; Gavin I. Langmuir, Towards a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 200–201; Fried, The Middle Ages, Chap. 1; Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Robin R. Mundill, “Christian and Jewish Lending Patterns and Financial Dealings During the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Credit and Debit in Medieval England c. 1180-c. 1350, eds., P. R. Schofield and N. J. Mayhew (Oxford: Oxbow, 2002), 45, 211; Koyama, “Evading,” 2; Borer, The City of London, 54, 93; Paul Rapin de Thoyras, An Abridgement of the History of England (London: John and Paul Knapton, 1747), 217; William Stubbs, Select Charters of English Constitutional History, ed. H. W. C. Davis (Oxford, 1923), 256 in Cave and Coulson, Sourcebook for Medieval Economic History, 176-77; Hans F. Sennholz, Age of Inflation (Belmont, MA: Western Islands, 1979), 21.
33.The quote in the original reads:…Povertá, alto sapere,/a nulla cosa soiacere,/en desprezo possedere/tutte le cose create./…Chi desia è posseduto,/a quel ch’ama s’è venduto;/s’egli pensa que n’ha ‘vuto,/’han avute rei derrate./….La richeza el tempo tolle,/la scienzia en vento estolle,/la fama alberga ed acolle/l’ipocresia d’onne contrate./Jacopone da Todi, “De la Santa Povertá e Suo Triplice Cielo” (On Holy Poverty and Her Threefold Heaven) Laude 60, reprinted in Evelyn Underhill, Jacopone da Todi: Poet and Mystic 1228–1306, A Spiritual Biography (London, Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1919), 421–27; Fried, The Middle Ages, chap. 9.
34.Mollat and Wolff, The Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, 25; Seabourne, Royal Regulation of Loans and Sales, 40, 44, 62, 68.
35.William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 44–45, 62; Whittock, Brief History, 141; Seabourne, Royal Regulation of Loans and Sales, 45, 51.
“The Purses and Leeches of Princes”
By the twelfth century, merchants and trade were viewed as potentially good for society and in the thirteenth century, trade was regularized with the aim of reducing risk and increasing exports for greater profit. The rise in tenants paying cash rents pushed them to produce surplus for markets, while increased commercialization prompted greater control over law and order by the authorities as well as significant capital. This was acceptable so long as merchants remained within the perimeters of moral integrity. Usury remained outside those borderlines but, nevertheless, the practice was expanding, not contracting. In England, at the end of the twelfth century, loan charters (Chartae or Chirographa), written in Hebrew, Latin, or French, were kept not in the Jews’ homes but in “a publick Chest provided for that purpose, called the Chest of the Chirographi, or of the Chirographers.” This step was taken in order to prevent mobs from destroying the debt records by burning down Jews’ houses. One part of the chirograph was kept by the Jewish moneylender, signed with the borrowers seal. There were three locks on the chest where the other part of the chirograph was put and keys were given to two Christians and two Jews, as well as clerks of the place in which the chest was housed. When it came time to open the chests, the chirographers, both Jews and Christians, along with the sheriff, cofferers, and, in London, the barons of the ←24 | 25→←25 | 26→Exchequer were all present. Copies of the receipts of any payments made to the Jews were likewise given to the Christians, the Jews, and the keeper of the rolls.1
Peter the Chanter (d. 1197), head cantor at Notre Dame in Paris, protested that “the detestable usurers are now the bosom companions of princes and prelates, who surrender to the blandishments of the moneybags and promote their sons to the highest posts in Church and State.” Usurers were “the purses and leeches of princes” who by vomiting cash, sucked everyone dry and avarice was their daughter. Along with this charge, he added the rebuke that the creditor made a profit without physical exertion. This was an accusation that was to endure over the centuries; work meant physical labor and if financial gain by usury could happen even as the moneylender slept, then it was not honest work or any kind of work.2
Peter’s vicious attack on moneylenders was correct in one aspect. Money became more necessary in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in transactions between the king and his subjects, landlords and their tenants, and in fairs and markets. If between 1160s and 1170s, the currency in circulation in England was less than one million pennies, by the 1250s, it was fifteen million, due in large part to the wool trade and an increase in silver mining. The appearance of smaller denominations in the thirteenth century made it possible for many more people to use coins for everday purchases. As R.H. Britnell writes, the “commercial development of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries permitted a growth in population … and greatly enriched the resources of knowledge and experience which future generations had at their disposal.” In 1202, Leonardo of Pisa, who was later became known as Fibonacci, wrote Liber Abaci (The Book of Calculation) in which he used the Hindu-Arabic numerical system to cover fractions and their application to commercial bookkeeping, currency conversion, and calculation of interest. It was the first time that mathematics was tied to profit making and moneylending and offered in terms