On these matters, as the practice of borough and manor, as well as of national governments, shows, the Church was preaching to the converted, and to dismiss its teaching on economic ethics as the pious rhetoric of professional moralists is to ignore the fact that precisely similar ideas were accepted in circles which could not be suspected of any unnatural squeamishness as to the arts by which men grow rich. The best commentary on ecclesiastical doctrines as to usury and prices is the secular legislation on similar subjects, for, down at least to the middle of the sixteenth century, their leading ideas were reflected in it. Plain men might curse the chicanery of ecclesiastical lawyers, and gilds and boroughs might forbid their members to plead before ecclesiastical courts; but the rules which they themselves made for the conduct of business had more than a flavor of the canon law. Florence was the financial capital of medieval Europe; but even at Florence the secular authorities fined bankers right and left for usury in the middle of the fourteenth century, and, fifty years later, first prohibited credit transactions altogether, and then imported Jews to conduct a business forbidden to Christians.46 Cologne was one of the greatest of commercial entrepôts; but, when its successful business man came to make his will, he remembered that trade was perilous to the soul and avarice a deadly sin, and offered what atonement he could by directing his sons to make restitution and to follow some less dangerous occupation than that of the merchant.47 The burgesses of Coventry fought the Prior over a question of common rights for the best part of a century; but the Court Leet of that thriving business city put usury on a par with adultery and fornication, and decreed that no usurer could become mayor, councillor, or master of the gild.48 It was not that laymen were unnaturally righteous; it was not that the Church was all-powerful, though its teaching wound into men’s minds through a hundred channels, and survived as a sentiment long after it was repudiated as a command. It was that the facts of the economic situation imposed themselves irresistibly on both. In reality, there was no sharp collision between the doctrine of the Church and the public policy of the world of business—its individual practice was, of course, another matter—because both were formed by the same environment, and accepted the same broad assumptions as to social expediency.
The economic background of it all was very simple. The medieval consumer—we can sympathize with him today more easily than in 1914—is like a traveller condemned to spend his life at a station hotel. He occupies a tied house and is at the mercy of the local baker and brewer. Monopoly is inevitable. Indeed, a great part of medieval industry is a system of organized monopolies, endowed with a public status, which must be watched with jealous eyes to see that they do not abuse their powers. It is a society of small masters and peasant farmers. Wages are not a burning question, for, except in the great industrial centers of Italy and Flanders, the permanent wage-earning class is small. Usury is, as it is today in similar circumstances. For loans are made largely for consumption, not for production. The farmer whose harvest fails or whose beasts die, or the artisan who loses money, must have credit, seed-corn, cattle, raw materials, and his distress is the moneylender’s opportunity. Naturally, there is a passionate popular sentiment against the engrosser who holds a town to ransom, the monopolist who brings the livings of many into the hands of one, the moneylender who takes advantage of his neighbor’s necessities to get a lien on their land and foreclose. “The usurer would not loan to men these goods, but if he hoped winning, that he loves more than charity. Many other sins be more than this usury, but for this men curse and hate it more than other sin.”49
No one who examines the cases actually heard by the courts in the later Middle Ages will think that resentment surprising, for they throw a lurid light on the possibilities of commercial immorality.50 Among the peasants and small masters who composed the mass of the population in medieval England, borrowing and lending were common, and it was with reference to their petty transactions, not to the world of high finance, that the traditional attitude towards the moneylender had been crystallized. It was natural that “Juetta [who] is a usuress and sells at a dearer rate for accommodation,” and John the Chaplain, qui est usurarius maximus,51 should be regarded as figures at once too scandalous to be tolerated by their neighbors and too convenient to be altogether suppressed. The Church accepts this popular sentiment, gives it a religious significance, and crystallizes it in a system, in which economic morality is preached from the pulpit, emphasized in the confessional, and enforced, in the last resource, through the courts.
The philosophical basis of it is the conception of natural law. “Every law framed by man bears the character of a law exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the law of nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the law of nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere perversion of law.”52 The plausible doctrine of compensations, of the
