Activities

In their article entitled “Berge der Barmheirzigkeit” (engl. “Mountains of Piety”), Tanja Skambraks and Annette Kehnel describe early forms of sustainable action using the example of the Monti di Pietà. In this context, they also present the DFG project “Small-scale credit and market participation”, which reconstructs, among other things, the history and practice of small-scale credits in Italy in the late Middle Ages, based on medieval sources and close to everyday life. These financial injections had nothing to do with charity, however, but with the culture of well-organised pawnbrokers.

Please find the article here.

8. Juli 2021, 10:00 Uhr – Session 1524: Inventories and Last Wills as Sources for Credit Activities and Credit Networks in Late Medieval London and German Hanseatic and Lower Rhine Cities

Sponsor: German Research Foundation: Project “Small-scale credit and market participation”

• Markus Schniggendiller: Inventories and Wills as Complementary Sources for the Credit Activities of St Paul's Canons
• Monika Gussone: Credit Practices and Credit Networks in Late Medieval Lower Rhine Cities as Apparent in Inventories and Testaments
• Hiram Kümper: Private Debt and Credit Networks in Hansa Cities: The Value of Last Wills

Focusing on north-western Europe (north-western Germany, England), members of the DFG research project “Small-scale Credit and Market Participation” focused on the ubiquity of credit in pre-modern societies at the IMC (International Medieval Congress) Leeds . The section discussed the value of wills and inventories as sources regarding information on credit relations and practices.

Death was the ideal opportunity for renegotiating credit relationships and settling debts. This is illustrated by wills, a source genre that reveals more about credit than might initially be expected. This is an extremely valuable discovery, as the lack of sources has traditionally been one of the major problems in the study of medieval small loans. These were often granted informally and thus rarely recorded by pragmatic writing, or their documentation was destroyed directly after repayment. On the one hand, wills and inventories provide information about such informal loans; on the other hand, they provide insight into social and economic relationships as well as credit practices. Their potential for evaluation in the study of medieval credit relations was the topic of the three presentations, all of which approached the sources from a different perspective. All speakers demonstrated the value of these sources through material-saturated studies. The first presentation showed how inventories can be used as a complementary source to other types of sources, such as court records. The following presentation demonstrated how credit practices can be reconstructed using inventories and wills. Finally, the last presentation dealt with how the potential of serially transmitted wills can be used for the possible research of credit networks.

In addition to a large number of surviving court records of the Court of Common Pleas, wills and inventories provide a much deeper insight into the credit activities of the clergy of St. Paul's, as Markus Schniggendiller first made clear. Using the will of a 14th century London bishop, he illustrated different practices of lending and showed that people of high social status were part of the credit networks not only as creditors but also as debtors. Furthermore, he revealed credit relations between the canons of St. Paul's and the poorest of the London population by presenting the inventory of the household of Helen Walssh, the widow of a mariner.

In her talk, Monika Gussone used wills and inventories from small towns in the Lower Rhine region to reconstruct credit practices. Estate inventories sometimes reveal the complete credit relationships of a deceased person and his or her spouse at the time of death. The names of all credit partners are mentioned and, moreover, almost all of a person's mobile assets are listed. It is also not uncommon for wills written at the end of life to reveal numerous credit relationships. The death of a person was an obvious time to renegotiate credit relationships and settle debts. But settling debts during one's lifetime was recognisably not a high priority. This task was left to the heirs or specified in the will.

Afterwards, HIRAM KÜMPER discussed, among other things, common practices in the wills of various Hanseatic cities. In some cases, testators released debtors from their debts, in other cases they ordered their repayment to one of the heirs or to an ecclesiastical institution. In his talk, Kümper emphasised a decisive advantage of wills and inventories: they provide information about informal loans, which were usually very small in terms of value and were often granted to family members. Therefore, they are rarely mentioned in notary registers or similar, but are crucial for research on the dynamics of pre-modern societies. The use of digital methods to explore large amounts of data could prove to be a helpful tool in this regard.

Combined with other source genres, wills and inventories provide essential information on the social and economic relationships of people in the late Middle Ages and thus allow deep insights into medieval credit behaviour. People from all social strata were to be found both as debtors and creditors in the credit networks – credit was omnipresent. This is demonstrated not least by the three papers in the section “Inventories and Last Wills as Sources for Credit Activities and Credit Networks in Late Medieval London and German Hanseatic and Lower Rhine Cities” at this year's IMC Leeds.