Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

Default and Modern Process 135
seems to be the importance of having a system of easily transferable ownership
and of efficient enforcement. Default judgements contribute to the latter goal.
Straightforward though the argument is, the economic evidence will support
it only in a limited form. In spite of the notorious South Sea Bubble,
ownership of private shares was not a widespread form of seventeenth- or
eighteenth-century wealth holding. The financial revolution of the eighteenth
century came in public, not in private finance. 31 True, the Bank of England
regularized national credit and enabled Britain to conduct several expensive
wars without jeopardizing internal security. Its shares became a standard form
of investment among the small class fortunate enough to have money to invest.
But the important thing about the Bank was that it did pay its debts; it never
tested the efficacy of legal enforcement mechanisms. Even if it had, one can
scarcely imagine that the availability of default judgements would have swayed
a prospective creditor of the Bank. If the Bank had failed, high politics, not
creditors' remedies, would have determined the outcome.
Private credit was another matter, one more amenable to explanation in
terms of the North-Thomas thesis. A wide network of small credit covered
seventeenth-century Britain, made essential in part by the chronic shortage
of currency: 32
Although the demand for credit was great, the market for credit was disorganized,
particularly for long-term loans. Lenders were a motley collection, frequently
indistinguishable as a group, for money-lending was a spare-time occupation for
most people . . . farmers, shopkeepers, petty traders . . . merchants. . . widows.
Such a situation sounds like the stuff to bolster the North-Thomas argument
in a carefully limited form. Petty credit in the aggregate can be important
to a national economy, and default judgements would have significance
in speeding the flow of petty debt collection: such debtors are the least
likely to raise defences and such creditors are most likely to see a
connection between legal remedies and debt collection. We have good
evidence that such creditors made heavy use of the legal system. As
C.W. Brooks' study of the lower branches of the bar argues, The single
most important fact about the history of the profession (and the system
within which it operated) during this period is that from the mid sixteenth
century until the outbreak of the Civil War, litigation came flooding into
Westminster Hall both suddenly and on an unprecedented scale'. 33 Actions
of debt dominated this increase. In both King's Bench and Common Pleas,
roughly 80 per cent of the seventeenth-century actions filed employed the
writ of debt, a significant increase over the previous century. 34 Not all
31 P.G.M. Dickson, op. cit. n.28, 489.
32 L.A. Clarkson, op. cit. n.29, 48.
33 C.W. Brooks, op. cit. n.12, 48.
34 Ibid., 69. The proportion of debt actions in the total docket increased from 19 per cent (King's
Bench) and 67 per cent (Common Pleas) in 1560 to 80 per cent (King's Bench) and 88 per cent (Common
Pleas) in 1640. Ibid.