3

being fixed at ten per cent.1 The strictness of the usury laws prompted an inevitable recourse to systematic evasion; and in the thirteenth century the Caursines especially earned an unenviable notoriety. As a societas they were able to escape punishment, for in canon law the offence of usury could only be brought home apparently to individuals. Alvarus Pelagius writing in the following century raised the question: "What is the case of cities or associations that give money on usury? Is each person in them a usurer and bound to restitution?" And he replies: "It seems not, for the case of a universitas is not the case of the individuals who compose it "2. The usury laws were the more shortsighted, for at a time when the supply of currency was insufficient they combined with the prevailing sense of insecurity to induce men to hoard their treasure, or convert it into plate, instead of freely circulating it from hand to hand. Landowners especially suffered from the scarcity of money. When the lord of Berkeley travelled to London in the thirteenth century, he kept two of his servants to bring bread from Essex," rather than he would to the market or baker to buy for money"; and on his journeys he carried oats for his horses' provender "to save the expenses of his purse Even two centuries later Lady Berkeley could write to her husband: "At the reverence of God send money, or else I must lay my horse to pledge and come home on my feet": her lord thereupon borrowed twenty-two marks and pledged as security "one gilt mass-book, a chalice of silver weighing eighteen ounces, and a chasuble "5. The correspondence of the Plumpton family reveals pathetic glimpses of the straits to which they were reduced. "We are brought to begger-staffe", wrote the wife of Sir Robert Plumpton; "I have sent to Wright of Idell for the money that he promised you, and he saith he hath it not to lend and makes excuses, so that I can get none nowhere. And as for

1 Statutes, iii. 996. Repealed ibid. iv. part i. 155 (1552). De Planctu Ecclesiae, cit. R. J. Whitwell, Italian Bankers and the English Crown ", in Trans. Royal Hist. Soc. N.S. xvii. 209. 3 Shaw, History of Currency, 14.

4 Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 167.

• Plumpton Correspondence, ed. T. Stapleton (1839), 198.

Ibid. ii. 63.

wood, there is none they [the dealers] will buy, for they know you want money, and without they might have it half for naught they will buy none". She sends to her husband all she can muster, a sum of three or four shillings. But with the accession of Elizabeth, England entered upon a new stage in her national development and the usury laws broke down completely before the great expansion of her industrial and commercial activities.

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