This book is an introduction to medieval economic thought, mainly from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, as it emerges from the works of academic theologians and lawyers and other sources - from Italian merchants' writings to vernacular poetry, Parliamentary legislation, and manorial court rolls. It raises a number of questions based on the Aristotelian idea of the mean, the balance and harmony underlying justice, as applied by medieval thinkers to the changing economy. How could private ownership of property be reconciled with God's gift of the earth to all in common? How could charity balance resources between rich and poor? What was money? What were the just price and the just wage? How was a balance to be achieved between lender and borrower and how did the idea of usury change to reflect this? The answers emerge from a wide variety of ecclesiastical and secular sources.

The canonist John of Ayton was described by Maitland as being ‘a little too human to be strictly scientific’. His best-known work, the commentary on the legatine constitutions of Otto (1237) and Ottobuono (1268), was dubbed a ‘grumbling gloss’, which often became ‘a growl against the bad world in which he lives, the greedy prelates, the hypocritical friars, the rapacious officials’. But this, while it may not make him the ideal canonist, is precisely what makes a study of his view of society rewarding.

Medieval biblical commentators traditionally interpreted the Bible in terms of the ‘four senses’ of Scripture—the literal-historical and the three ‘spiritual’ senses, the allegorical, the tropological or moral, and the anagogical. Recently attention has been focused on the use of a variation of the allegorical sense, namely, political allegory. This was the application of a biblical text to a current political situation or argument. The Roman revolutionary Cola di Rienzo, after hearing Pope Clement VI preach in consistory, gave it another name altogether—sensum adulterum. Clement had apparently delivered the customary papal allegorization of the two-swords passage (Luke, xix. 38), according to which both swords, that of spiritual authority and of physical power, were in the hands of the priesthood.

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