Credit

The borrowing and lending of money by participants in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century maritime industry has to be viewed in the light of contemporary mercantile practices. There was widespread use of credit, in the form of extended repayment terms, in all branches of English home and overseas trade from the thirteenth century onwards. Chaucer's remark, in ‘The Shipman's Tale’, about the merchant ‘Ther wist no wight that he was in dette, / So estatly was he of his governaunce’ suggests a generally recognised lack of solvency amongst merchants around 1400. Further, as Sloth confesses in Piers Plowman, written about the same time: ‘If I bigge and borwe aught, but if [unless] it be ytailed [recorded] / I foryete it as yerne [immediately], and if men me it axe / Sixe sithes [times] or sevene, I forsake it with othes [deny it with oaths]’, not all debts were repaid in time. Edward I's and Edward's III's legislative attempts to protect creditors by the registration of debts led to the enrolment of many agreements. These registrations, and the records of litigation against debtors, in a variety of court rolls and fourteenth- and fifteenth-century letterbooks and recognisance rolls, are evidence of the wide use of credit. Since many less formal credit arrangements were made and agreed with only a handshake, the tally stick, an exchange of earnest money or the giving of ‘God's penny’ (all in the presence of witnesses), the full extent of the use of credit cannot be known.