Medieval Merchants and Money: Essays in Honour of James L. Bolton, ed. Martin Allen and Matthew Davies

Abstract

This book is a collection of essays that came out of conference papers initially presented at Queen Mary University in London in 2013. Its main purpose is to celebrate and honour the work of Professor Jim Bolton. The sixteen essays included in this collection are divided into six sections which comprise four more general themes: London, Merchants, Immigration and Money—the main topics Jim Bolton was interested in throughout his career. The collection, edited by Martin Allen and Matthew Davies, is opened by four studies (Justin Colson, Matthew Davies, Caroline Barron and Christian Steer) on London which consider the city’s guilds and merchants. Their focus ranges from the Companies’ record-keeping and their politics, to the devotional dynamics of the mercantile community. The following three contributions are very good examples of how existing digitised records databases can be used for demographic research. Adrian Bell and Sam Gibbs investigate the merchants and their involvement in the English military by combining the poll tax returns and ‘The Soldier in Later Medieval England’ databases; the importance of mobility is examined by Francesco Guidi Bruscoli and Jessica Lutkin by looking at English merchants’ presence and their activities in Florence and the presence of aliens in London, respectively. Although Anne Sutton’s chapter deals principally with the Iceland trade, it also illuminates our understanding of English overseas trade and the relationship between the English Crown and native and alien merchants. We are reminded once again that commercial success was a prerequisite for any political aspiration by Samantha Harper’s excellent case-study of English goldsmiths and their presence at the royal court. Martin Allen gives a chronologically wide overview of how English and Burgundian governmental attempts to regulate bullion were not only prejudicial for the exchange rate, but for merchants and trade too. On the same topic, through several case-studies drawn from royal legal records (King’s Bench), Hannes Kleineke informs us that, even though counterfeiting coin was considered a serious crime, the punishments arising from prosecution were rather ineffective.