LONDON SCRIVENERS AND THE ESTATE MARKET IN THE LATER SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Abstract

T HE doings of Tudor and Stuart scriveners were registered by contemporaries with noticeable disapproval. In addition to exercising their purely clerical art they frequently acted as legal and financial intermediaries, and thus came under fire from current opinion on middlemen. From this uncomfortable position they have found their way into the historians' pages and emerged as pioneers of banking and stock-broking. Prof. Tawney has shown how the booming land market of Elizabethan England, with the consequent increase in the business of drawing up bonds and arranging mortgages, provided much profitable labour for the scrivener.' It seems clear, too, that many of the profession turned from the legal work which would to-day be described as conveyancing to a type of financial business which contemporaries called 'scrivening', those engaged being sometimes distinguished as 'money-scriveners '.2 As is usual when specialized functions are gradually appearing, early practitioners covered a wide field. By I 624 scriveners were described in an Act of Parliament as persons who 'received other men's monies or estates into their trust or custody '. It has been suggested that attorneys and notaries were admitted to the Company of Scriveners-incorporated in i6I7-and in this way the Company contrived to preserve its monopoly of the conveyancing work which could apparently lead to a hybrid of functions.4 According to the needs of clients, they advanced money for marriage settlements or acted as financial 'contact-men'. Inevitably they figured as 'extortioners' and ' chargers of excessive usury'.5 Dekker, in the i630's could write of 'gull-gropers' and 'money-mongers',6 and a century later Defoe was warning his English tradesman against the wiles of the ' Procurer or Scrivener or Banker' and noting that the 'customary encroachments of Usurers, Money-Lenders, Scriveners etc.... have been the scandal of the times'.7 It is obviously difficult to draw the distinction in the work of early financial middlemen between banking and broking. Evidence to suggest that the scrivener figured amongst early bankers includes, for instance, Dudley North's observation that 'the Merchants and Gentlemen... keep their Money for the most part with Goldsmiths and Scriveners, and they, instead of having Ten