Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Richard Britnell: An Appreciation
- 1 Unreal Wages: Long-Run Living Standards and the ‘Golden Age’ of the Fifteenth Century
- 2 Minimum Wages and Unemployment Rates in Medieval England: The Case of Old Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 1256–1357
- 3 Crisis Management in London's Food Supply, 1250–1500
- 4 Grain Shortages in Late Medieval Towns
- 5 Market Regulation in Fifteenth-Century England
- 6 Self-Government in the Small Towns of Late Medieval England
- 7 Marketing and Trading Networks in Medieval Durham
- 8 Peasant Opportunities in Rural Durham: Land, Vills and Mills, 1400–1500
- 9 The Shipmaster as Entrepreneur in Medieval England
- 10 Cheating the Boss: Robert Carpenter's Embezzlement Instructions (1261×1268) and Employee Fraud in Medieval England
- 11 The Public Life of the Private Charter in Thirteenth-Century England
- 12 Luxury Goods in Medieval England
- Index of People and Places
- Bibliography of the Writings of Richard Britnell
- Tabula Gratulatoria
11 - The Public Life of the Private Charter in Thirteenth-Century England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Richard Britnell: An Appreciation
- 1 Unreal Wages: Long-Run Living Standards and the ‘Golden Age’ of the Fifteenth Century
- 2 Minimum Wages and Unemployment Rates in Medieval England: The Case of Old Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 1256–1357
- 3 Crisis Management in London's Food Supply, 1250–1500
- 4 Grain Shortages in Late Medieval Towns
- 5 Market Regulation in Fifteenth-Century England
- 6 Self-Government in the Small Towns of Late Medieval England
- 7 Marketing and Trading Networks in Medieval Durham
- 8 Peasant Opportunities in Rural Durham: Land, Vills and Mills, 1400–1500
- 9 The Shipmaster as Entrepreneur in Medieval England
- 10 Cheating the Boss: Robert Carpenter's Embezzlement Instructions (1261×1268) and Employee Fraud in Medieval England
- 11 The Public Life of the Private Charter in Thirteenth-Century England
- 12 Luxury Goods in Medieval England
- Index of People and Places
- Bibliography of the Writings of Richard Britnell
- Tabula Gratulatoria
Summary
Over the course of his career, Richard Britnell has frequently used charter evidence to document major attributes of the economy and society of medieval England. One thinks immediately of his pioneering use of royal market charters to illustrate the spread of commercialisation, but other examples also come to mind, such as the role charters played in creating the trust in public norms and rules that underpinned economic growth in the period and the way in which charter use facilitated pragmatic literacy. His work has demonstrated the value of looking at the medieval economy as something embedded within a larger social and political framework, such that changes in law or administrative procedures could have significant repercussions on economic activity and vice versa.
This essay on the use of charters in medieval England is offered in the same spirit. One of the primary manifestations of the entrepreneurial spirit of the period involved the commoditising of land and the formation of an increasingly active land market. Beginning in the later twelfth century, people came increasingly to treat land as an economic asset rather than as a static source of consumption and marker of status. A host of other changes happened in conjunction with this development. Some were principally economic, such as rising monetisation and an increasing emphasis on producing commodities for sale. Others involved law and politics, such as the introduction and subsequent expansion of the possessory assizes and the use of ‘feet of fines’ to record land transactions in royal court records.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Commercial Activity, Markets and Entrepreneurs in the Middle AgesEssays in Honour of Richard Britnell, pp. 199 - 216Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011