This study on the late-medieval decline of English manorial demesne agriculture is based on the Germanic paradigm of Gutsherrschaft and Grundherrschaft, which historians have utilized to explain the transformation of feudal agriculture, east of the Elbe River, from the 15th to the 18th...

The renown or infamy of Henry VIII's Great Debasement (1542 - 1553), which the government of his successor, Edward VI, continued for another six years after his death, has unfairly obscured his earlier and far more modest coinage changes and public-spirited monetary policies. Furthermore,...

This paper assesses Revolutionary and Napoleonic wartime economic policy. Suspension of gold convertibility in 1797 allowed the Bank of England to nurture British monetary orthodoxy. The Order of the Privy Council suspended gold payments on Bank of England notes and afforded simultaneous...

Although the leaf-thin bracteates are the most fragile coins in monetary history, they were the main coin type for almost two centuries in large parts of medieval Europe. The usefulness of the bracteates can be linked to the contemporary monetary taxation policy. Medieval coins were frequently...

Coinage debasement in medieval and early modern Europe remains an ill-understood topic; and indeed an often cited article ("The Debasement Puzzle": Velde and Weber, 1996) sought to demonstrate that coinage debasements were both impractical and economically futile. The purpose of this study is to...

This paper is a critique of Michael Postan's famous Malthusian-Ricardo model demonstrating that late-medieval prices and wages were essentially determined by demographic factors, especially after the Black Death, while contending that monetary factors played no role in determining prices or...

Re-coinage implies that old coins are declared invalid and exchanged for new ones at fixed exchange rates and dates. Empirical evidence shows that re-coinage could occur as often as twice a year within a currency area in the Middle Ages. The exchange fee at re-coinage worked as a monetary tax...

In medieval Europe, old coins were frequently declared invalid and exchanged for new ones at fixed rates and dates. Here, the question of whether and when such re-coinage was applied in medieval Sweden is analyzed against the historical record. A theory of how short-lived coinage systems work is...

Gesell taxes on money holdings have received attention in recent decades as a way of alleviating the zero lower bound on interest rates. Less known is that such a tax was the predominant method used to generate seigniorage in large parts of medieval Europe for around two centuries. When the...

Gesell taxes on money holdings have received attention in recent decades as a way of alleviating the zero lower bound on interest rates. Less known is that such a tax was the predominant method used to generate seigniorage in large parts of medieval Europe for around two centuries. When the...