Chapter 27 - Just Price and Usury

Summary

This subject is so characteristic of the difference between medieval and modern life, for good or for evil, that we must dwell upon it at some length.

Until the middle of our period there was very little capitalism in England. There was plenty in Florence and Venice, Cologne and Lübeck, Ghent and Bruges; there we already find merchants of the modern type, risking their own money and other men's lives. In England, for some time after the Conquest, most men risked not only their money but their life. In London, however, and Bristol and a few other towns, there was the beginning of capitalism. It was marked at first mainly among the great foreign merchants who traded with us; Lombards, or men of the Hansa or Flemings; and, with capitalism, came an intensification of the problem of usury, of lending money out at interest. Here, as in so many other ways, the Church did indeed guide, but less definitely and less widely than is often represented: certainly less than her position and her lofty exclusivist pretensions would warrant. The problem of trade morality scarcely existed in the days when the first apostolic Christian community had all things in common; when there were no church buildings and only a fluid hierarchical organization. Even in the succeeding generations, it is natural to find the Christian Fathers either ignoring or reprobating trade, just as they ignored or reprobated the decoration of churches with images.