Foreign Bankers in Medieval English Towns

Long before Lombard Street became a byword for London banking, the city’s very first dedicated financial trading house had already opened for business — run not by the Lombards people usually picture, but by merchants from the Tuscan city of Lucca.

The Riccardi of Lucca set up shop in London by the 13th century, adjacent to what’s still called Bucklersbury today. After the expulsion of the Jews in 1290, and the resulting gap in England’s credit market, Lombard bankers from northern Italy stepped in to finance the crown and major players across the English economy — and by the mid-14th century, three great banking houses from Florence — the city that gave its name to the florin — had joined them: the Bardi, the Peruzzi, and the Frescobaldi. Their profit margins were, by modern standards, remarkably modest: Florentine merchants trading English wool typically made around 15 per cent, while English wool merchants exporting their own goods to the continent could expect roughly 20 per cent — plenty of profit left in the domestic economy even after the foreign bankers had taken their cut.

German merchants of the Hanseatic League set up their own trading base at the Steelyard near London Bridge and came to dominate 14th-century London’s export trade, eventually electing City aldermen of their own — one of whom, William Walworth, would later become rather more famous for personally killing Wat Tyler at the climax of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. Dutch immigrants, meanwhile, brought skills in leatherworking, goldsmithing, printing, clock-making and brick manufacture, at a time when most English buildings still relied on timber and stone rather than fired brick. London’s population of registered “aliens” doubled between 1440 and 1501, from 1,500 to 3,000 — a genuinely cosmopolitan trading city, whatever the popular image of insular medieval England might suggest.

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