Finance on the Frontier: Money and Credit in Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland, in the Later Middle Ages

Nicholas Mayhew’s work has made a major contribution to the debates about the expansion and decline of the medieval English economy by claiming for money the significance which for too long was denied it. In doing this he has had to counter some of M.M. Postan’s arguments which his followers still repeat today (Mayhew, 2013b, pp. 6–20). One of them is that if money was such an important influence on prices, wages and credit then ‘fluctuations in the money supply should have resulted in broad uniformity rather than diversity’; wages should have shown ‘broadly similar patterns of rise and decline’, and credit, too, ‘should have dried up everywhere in line with the decline in the money supply’ (Hatcher and Bailey, 2001, p. 61; Langdon, 2010, p. 123; Bolton, 2012, p. 307). These arguments interpret the role of money in the economy in terms only of major changes in its volume, and ignore where, and by what means, it was distributed. They assume that when imports of bullion increased significantly, coin must have flowed like a tidal wave from the mints to the provinces, uniformly affecting prices, wages and credit in every region and locality. If the evidence shows persistent regional and local diversity, this is seen as proof that the money supply cannot have been a major agent of economic change.