Bullish Markets: The Property Market in Thirteenth-Century Coventry The Midland History Prize Essay (original) (raw)

Real estate and financial markets in England and the Low Countries, 1300-1800 CGEH Working Paper Series 42

Mortgage markets in developing economies are often confined to private networks. Inadequate registration of property rights has been blamed for this, but it is questionable whether registration provides a simple and complete solution. This paper addresses this issue by analysing the Low Countries, where registration was organised well, and England, where registration was organised poorly, between 1300 and 1800. These historical cases show that registration was important but did neither provide a simple nor a complete solution for the emergence of broad mortgage markets. Successful historical markets took considerable time to appear and also addressed mortgage law and financial intermediation

Real estate and financial markets in England and the Low Countries, 1300-1800

CGEH working paper 42

Mortgage markets in developing economies are often confined to private networks. Inadequate registration of property rights has been blamed for this, but it is questionable whether registration provides a simple and complete solution. This paper addresses this issue by analysing the Low Countries, where registration was organised well, and England, where registration was organised poorly, between 1300 and 1800. These historical cases show that registration was important but did neither provide a simple nor a complete solution for the emergence of broad mortgage markets. Successful historical markets took considerable time to appear and also addressed mortgage law and financial intermediation.

Property rents in medieval English towns: Hull in the fourteenth century

Urban History, 2018

ABSTRACT:Property rents in medieval towns were an important source of income for property-owners including the king, local lords and civic authorities, and a significant expense for local residents. This article examines the causes of variation in property rents in fourteenth-century Hull, an important international port with unique records on plot dimensions. It illuminates the topography and growth of the port, identifying locations where rents were highest, and particular streets which attracted premium rents. Civic and mercantile property-owners are examined through reconstruction of their biographies and the impact of the identity of owners on rent levels is assessed.

The land market of a Pennine manor: Slaidburn, 1650–1780

Continuity and Change, 1999

The quantitative study of English land markets in the three centuries after the close of the middle ages is still in its infancy. The medievalists, exploiting the conveyances of customary tenants recorded in manorial court rolls, have shown how issues such as the devolution of land within families, the frequency with which land was sold and the behaviour of the land market at moments of demographic or economic stress can be addressed by the analysis of such data either aggregatively or by looking at the landholding histories of individual participants in the land market. Early modernists have invariably approached the study of the land market in a non-quantitative fashion, usually as part of an attempt to make observations about some other characteristic of English history. Stone looked at the land market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as part of his campaign to prove that the aristocracy was in decline, Macfarlane to show that the property-holding behaviour of the...

The public annuity market of an upcoming city: Antwerp (14th – early 15th century)

J. Zuijderduijn, D. Raeymaekers (ed.), Publieke financiën in de Lage Landen (1300-1800) - Vlaams-Nederlandse Vereniging voor Nieuwe Geschiedenis n. 14, 2015

The late medieval urban public debts have been thoroughly studied by several generations of scholars. The fourteenth and early fifteenth century Antwerp still represents an interesting and less investigated subject. Following the most recent historiographical trends, this contribution will revolve around three aspects of public debt: 1) interest rates of the renten 2) the geographic origin of renten buyers and owners 3) their social identity. These three factors will show the existence of a quite developed and open capital market. The fairly high prices of the renten, however, authorize to suppose that the access on the renten market in Antwerp was partially limited to those who belonged to the better-off.

Review of 'Medieval Birmingham: the Borough Rentals of 1296 and 1344-5' edited by G. Demidowicz (2008)

The Local Historian, 46 (2016), 166, 2016

The origins of England’s second city lie in a small medieval town of perhaps 250 dwellings and 1250 people. Previous studies of the early history of Birmingham, like those of many smaller medieval towns, have been hampered by the lack of surviving evidence. So the discovery of two rentals from the medieval borough, which are published and analysed in this book, is particularly exciting. They were compiled in 1296 and 1344-1345, and were found among the Dudley papers at Longleat House in Wiltshire. Using these documents, Demidowicz reconstructs the topography and analyses the distribution of wealth and economic activities of medieval Birmingham.

The house-building sector of London's economy, 1550–1650

Urban History, 2012

ABSTRACT:London historians marvel at London's population growth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but never at how those hundreds of thousands of people got housed. It did not just ‘happen’; building tens of thousands of houses required marshalling land, money, materials and labour, and directing them at specific building sites. The task was performed by a myriad of small-scale builders from most walks of life, projectors who used contracts to have work done they could not perform themselves. All this was done in an environment of considerable risk in building new houses because of royal prohibitions against doing so, and facing large fines, sometimes imprisonment, and their new houses pulled down.