Table of Contents

1. Introduction: mortgages and annuities in historical perspective.- 2. Mortgages and the English peasantry c.1250-c.1350.- 3. Mortgages raised by rural English copyhold tenants 1605-1735.- 4. Mortgages and the Kentish yeoman in the seventeenth century.-  5. Why the equity of redemption? 6. Credit and land: the Jews of Zaragoza 1383-1400.- 7. Not only land: mortgage credit in central-northern Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.- 8. Rural credit markets in eighteenth-century France: contracts, guarantees and land.- 9. The use of perpetual annuities in rural Brabant in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.- 10. Proactive peasants? The role of annuities in a late medieval communal society: the Campine area, Low Countries.- 11. The other fundamental problem of exchange: mortgages, defaults, and debtor protection in sixteenth-century Holland.- 12. Afterword: mortgages as a mediation between kin and capital. 

About the Author

Chris Briggs, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval British Social and Economic History at the University of Cambridge, UK, and affiliated to Selwyn College, Cambridge. Dr Briggs is the author of a number of studies of credit and debt in the medieval economy, including Credit and village society in fourteenth century England (2009).

Jaco Zuijderduijn, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Economic History at Lund University, Sweden. He publishes widely on the financial history of the later Middle Ages, with a particular focus on how individuals made use of financial markets. He is the author of Medieval capital markets. Markets for ‘renten’, state formation and private investment in Holland (1300-1550) (2009).