Two people of full capacity agree that one shall lend money or sell goods to the other. There is no overt coercion. Neither party reneges on the deal. Why should any external authority seek to become involved? The extent to which ‘central authorities’ have sought to be involved in prescribing and proscribing the terms of bargains such as sales or loans agreed between individuals has fluctuated considerably, and the extent to which they should so involve themselves continues to be a matter of controversy. Turning to the situation in medieval England, there is much in the rules laid down in this area and particularly in laws against usury, forestalling and regrating and price regulations which is very foreign to the modern lawyer, and which seemed even more foreign to eighteenthand nineteenth-century commentators, living in a much less regulated world. There has been, for the last two centuries, a tendency to dismiss the laws, and those who enacted and enforced them, as foolish. Blackstone, for example, described the usury laws as a product of ‘the dark ages of monkish superstition and civil tyranny', J. H. Baker implied that they were ‘unworldly'. H. T. Riley described price regulation as being ‘of the most illiberal and tyrannical complexion'. R. H. Britnell singled out the ‘economic’ legislation of the late medieval period, including the matters discussed here, as being ‘of uncertain purpose'. The purpose of such laws may not be obvious, but it is worth consideration as part of a wider investigation of royal expectations of law, and understanding of the royal role, in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Best known of the laws with which the paper is concerned are those against usury, the exaction of profit on loans. This was entirely forbidden to Christians in medieval England, although, at points in the thirteenth century, Jews were allowed to take limited profit on loans. In sales of goods, there were both ‘direct’ rules, regulating the price at which goods might be sold, and ‘indirect’ rules, barring sales made with a view to dominating supply of a particular commodity and so being in a position to raise its price: rules against forestalling and regrating. The usury laws and some ‘direct’ price regulations were established by the later twelfth century, though the scope of the latter was to grow considerably during the fourteenth century.