Repudiations and Confiscations by the Medieval State

Abstract

Loan repudiations and property confiscations were common between medieval kings and individuals. Traditional accounts of these confiscations focus on factors affecting the kings, ignoring the motivations of the victims. This deficiency may be remedied by considering the problems faced on both sides of any agreement between a king and a group of citizens. A model is presented which explains the timing and the form of repudiations and confiscations without resorting to an assumption of irrationality by either party. It is general enough to address a persistent problem in the property rights view of government: How can an individual protect himself from abuses by his protector?

Plague, Politics, and Pogroms: The Black Death, Rule of Law, and the Persecution of Jews in the Holy Roman Empire

“…This line of reasoning is consistent with older work which argued that the Jews suffered expulsions and persecutions in England and France following the emergence of Italian merchants who could substitute for the role they played in the medieval economy (Veitch, 1986). …”

1688 and all that: property rights, the Glorious Revolution and the rise of British capitalism

“…We should not overlook the relatively advanced legal developments in England, compared to most other European countries. Acemoglu et al (2005a: 394) cited Veitch (1986) to assert that there were 'numerous financial defaults by medieval kings'. Veitch (1986: 31) himself wrote: 'Property confiscation and debt repudiation were common in medieval Europe'.…”

The political economy of expulsion: the regulation of Jewish moneylending in medieval England

“…They were able to provide advances on the basis of predicted future revenues and were thereby to smooth the king's income stream (Kaeuper 1973). Since the Italians only lent to a tiny elite at the top of English society and did not reside in England permanently, Italian bankers did not directly displace the Jews as Jews as Veitch (1986) supposed. 64 Edward I continued to raise tallages on the Jewish community in 1277 and again in 1287 but as Richardson notes '[i]n estimating the severity of the exactions of the 1270s it must be borne in mind that the total population of all the Jewish communities in the country at the time can scarcely have reached 3,000 souls, and that the great majority of them were poor and moreover that the burden of taxation fell upon a small number of wealthy families who were deprived of a large part of their working capital by the 'great tallage' and whose business was further restricted by the prohibition of overt usury by the Stature of the Jewry of 1275' (Richardson 1960, 216).…”

“…And, though a case can be made that it was precisely prior to, and during, the period of the expulsions that anti-Judaism became antisemitism as it imbibed 'irrational 71 As Ames and Rapp (1977); Tilly (1990); Kiser and Linton (2001) have argued it was war that drove both state formation and representative government, an idea that has been recently formalized by Besley and Persson (2009). 72 Previously both Veitch (1986) and Barzel (1992) have used similar rational choice explanations to account for the expulsion of the Jews. They treat the expulsion as an act of debt repudiation which seems inappropriate in the light of the more recent research by Stacey (1997) and Mundill (1998). fantasies', this perspective cannot adequately explain specific changes in a polity or in the mind of a ruler.…”

“…Using the theory of sovereign debt,Veitch (1986) argued that the arrival of Italian merchant bankers in the thirteenth century meant that the king was able to expel and expropriate the Jews. The evidence that the king did not gain directly from the expulsion shows that accounts that conflated the act of expulsion with that of debt repudiation are mistaken (this also applies toBarzel 1992).…”