Borrowing Money in Medieval England
Debt in medieval England was not something to take lightly — particularly when the person who owed you money might be armed and living in a castle.
According to the records, landholders were perpetually in debt. Medieval society prized generosity and looked down on thrift, so a prosperous landholder felt obliged to host great feasts and hand out gifts rather than put money aside for hard times. When the good harvests stopped, there was often little in reserve and no ready cash for essentials — and a single extravagant heir could squander in a few years what generations of careful predecessors had built up.
For loans, landholders had essentially two options: Lombard bankers, who had found ways around the Church’s ban on Christians charging interest, and Jewish moneylenders, who operated under a different and frequently shifting set of rules — including the Crown’s power to seize their records and demand payment of the debts owed to them. Peasants, meanwhile, mostly borrowed from each other, in a much smaller-scale, informal economy.
Collecting from a well-armed landholder sitting in his own keep was, unsurprisingly, easier said than done. Many debts simply lingered unpaid, while borrowers took out new loans to cover the interest on the old ones — a cycle that would be painfully familiar today, and a ready-made subplot for any landholder character sliding into financial trouble.
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