the transport of people and goods. As pilgrims made their often arduous journeys to view the body parts of saints in cathedrals, and theologians anxiously contemplated the omens in the skies, amber, honey, beeswax, glassware, basalt, metal jewelry, pottery, wool, and wine were carried across Europe. Tastes grew for more exotic items, and so spices (cumin, ginger, cardamom, and saffron) and luxurious textiles, such as silk and toile, arrived at ports from the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Levant. Aristocrats filled their drafty castles with tapestries, lit them with tallow candles, and decorated them with ever more comfortable furniture. They adorned themselves with more colorful and sumptuous textiles and jewels and bought armor to protect themselves in war.1
The late medieval world was one of hierarchy, privilege, servitude, and dependency. Private fortunes were concentrated in the hands of the monarchs and nobility and would continue to be for centuries to come. Up to the tenth century, ←1 | 2→the region was covered by forests and marshes, moors and heaths, and much of it was woefully unproductive. Life consisted of a network of obligations and duties with everyone born into their place in life as part of a feudal society. The economy was based on self-sufficiency, barter, and service-in-kind, that gave the individual little, if any, ability to sell their labor freely. Founded on vassalage and inherited land held by the king and his favored nobles, fiefdoms were granted from lords to their vassals in return for personal service and allegiance. These self-sufficient manorial estates were worked by the villeins—peasants who were subject to the lords—and serfs (a term that came from the Latin servus meaning slave) who were bonded to the feudal estate. But between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries, those feudal ties would be weakened. Even by the late eleventh century, many goods were being exchanged not by barter but according to the law of the market.2
In France, the unsystematic Carolingian villa economy evolved into a loosely structured type of manorial estate called a seigneurie. The small royal domain centered around Paris was surrounded by powerful lords who ruled, among other regions, Toulouse, Normandy, Champagne, Anjou, Brittany, Burgundy, and Aquitaine who were vassals of the king of France. In Italy, councils of prelates or nobles ruled over its patchwork land of independent duchies, kingdoms, and republics. England’s power, from the time of the Norman invasion in 1066, was more concentrated in the hands of its kings, although the weakness of a particular monarch was often the opportunity for powerful barons to exert their strength and demand certain rights and liberties. At the pinnacle of every society was the Church, the wealth of which lay in the extensive demesnes that had been transferred or bequeathed to monasteries and abbeys. Within the Church, there was a vast difference between the archbishops at the top and the poor rural priests who had more in common with the peasants. Nobles were equally varied with the highest lords in control of vast estates and holding immense power while, at the other end of the scale, were poor, low-status knights. Among the peasants, there were those who were wealthy enough to rent land out to tenants while others were landless and barely survived from day to day. But in a world of hierarchy, where status trumped wealth, it was more advantageous to be a poor priest or lowly knight than a rich peasant.3
Subsistence farming left the population at the mercy of the weather. If a crop failed, it could mean famine, which, in turn, often brought disease, malnutrition, plague and death, especially for the young, old, and weak. Feudalism reached its height in the eleventh century, but the economy was transforming. Change varied from manor to manor, town to town, and country to country and, as many ←2 | 3→historians have noted, there was no sudden divide between the manorial economy and the earliest stages of capitalism. Even as the instruments and methods of a capital-based economy were being implemented, it remained a highly structured economy that was “embedded in a system of mutual social responsibility.” Even so, in the middle of the eleventh century deeds of gift, including land, started to give way to title deeds contingent on money payment and coinage became a more common method of payment.4
Economic developments are perhaps best viewed as a continuum with distinct periods of expansion and decline. The eleventh to the beginning of the fourteenth century was a time of expansion. A milder, drier climate fostered more bountiful harvests and led to surplus produce that was sold at local, and increasingly, overseas markets. More coins were minted on a more regular basis and in larger amounts. Monasteries such as the one at Cluny increased their use of money and a larger number of peasants were paid in coinage. This greater circulation of cash prompted capital formation and paid for new and improved agricultural techniques and machinery, metal working, and new settlements. With more money available, nobles hired better craftsmen and day workers, and instituted farming on a bigger scale which yielded more surplus. The population grew and people demanded a greater amount of goods—whether meat, wool, timber, or leather—as well as a wider variety as overseas traders began to channel exotic spices and new textiles into Western Europe.5
As one historian observed, the economy of Western Europe experienced a “broad, sustained, and rapid development.” After centuries of brutal invasions by Vikings, Hungarians, and the Slavic Wends, European society enjoyed relative peace and sufficiently stable conditions to allow for sustained economic expansion until the early part of the fourteenth century. Western Europe, the once poor relation of the glittering Eastern Byzantium Empire, was on the threshold of a significant and life-changing economic boom. Land was cleared, forests felled, and marshes drained to create more agricultural land to feed its growing population and create surplus produce to sell in domestic markets and, increasingly, overseas. New buildings altered the landscape, and ever larger number of people trudged over more and better roads and bridges. Castles and churches began to dominate the towns and cities—symbols of power, culture, wealth, and, on the other hand, the World to Come. Construction was often crude, but there was a lot of it.6
There was no power without wealth. Those with power—the monarch, the Church, and the nobility—were usually exempt from taxation and the economic burden in the form of taxation and fines generally fell on the rest of society. In the eleventh century, tallages, or tailles, tended to be imposed spasmodically ←3 | 4→in response to a particular need or event. As expenses grew, rulers looked at all possibilities to replenish their coffers to pay for their wars, household expenses, hospitality, building projects, and the daily running of the kingdom. By the thirteenth century, tallages were usually annual and fixed and yet it was a constant battle to garner more funds without incurring flight, protest, and revolt on the part of the tax-burdened populace. Anxious to avoid rebellion, and aware that taxation was an unpopular method of financing the realm, kings often turned to creditors for loans. But this had one major disadvantage. Moneylenders expected a profit on their cash advance and that, in the eyes of the Church and hence society, was usury.
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“One went furtively to visit the money lender as one went to visit a whore,” the French historian Fernand Braudel wrote, “but one went all the same.” Except that not everyone went furtively. Credit revitalized the economy of Western Europe from the eleventh century and made Europe the center of trade, commerce, and cultural innovation. It was credit, as the modern economist Joseph A. Schumpeter later observed, that was the basis of Western Europe’s economic growth from the eleventh century and the foundation of the capitalist system that developed over the following centuries. It removed the necessity of wealth from free enterprise by allowing those without much money to fund projects and buy merchandise. And it was a network of moneylenders that provided that crucial credit to everyone from the monarch to the peasant.7
When William of Normandy made the crossing to England, landing at Pevensey on September 28, 1066, he met his rival for the English crown, Harold Godwinson, on the battlefield. The Norman soldiers charged against the defensive shield wall erected
