Lord Mansfield and the other judges who participated in the development and systematization of the law of bills and notes in the eighteenth century did have one significant advantage. They were working in a period of great prosperity and expansion in trade, finance, and industry, when there seems to have been little disagreement over the general policies that the legal system should adopt toward commercial affairs. That is by no means the universal condition. We have seen that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there was considerable controversy about the economic and moral issues posed by developments in financial techniques. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the English courts were faced with a some-what similar problem. A financing device long considered legitimate and desirable was adapted – or perverted – to uses deemed improper under prevailing financial mores. This chapter explores the complex relationship between legal issues and controversies concerning economic policy and morality that lie beneath the surface of a body of seemingly dry, technical issues about ‘accommodation bills’.

THE LIVESEY BANKRUPTCY AND ACCOMMODATION BILLS

In the year 1788, the firm of Livesey, Hargreaves & Co. of Lancashire went bankrupt. The firm was one of the largest cotton manufacturing enterprises that developed in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in England.