Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

AGE OF THE GREAT CAPITALIST EMPIRES 329
classes of rootless laborers, beggars, harlots, cutpurses, hawkers, pedlars,
fortune-tellers, minstrels, and other such "masterless men" or
"women of ill repute. "48
Cold cash was employed largely between strangers, or when paying
rents, tithes, and taxes to landlords, bailiffs, priests, and other
superiors. The landed gentry and wealthy merchants, who eschewed
handshake deals, would often use cash with one another, especially
to pay off bills of exchange drawn on London markets.49 Above all,
gold and silver were used by the government to purchase arms and
pay soldiers, and amongst the criminal classes themselves. This meant
that coins were most likely to be used both by the sort of people who
ran the legal system-the magistrates, constables, and justices of the
peace--and by those violent elements of society they saw it as their
business to control.
I I I I I
Over time, this led to an increasing disjuncture of moral universes.
For most, who tried to avoid entanglement in the legal system just as
much as they tried to avoid the affairs of soldiers and criminals, debt
remained the very fabric of sociability. But those who spent their working
lives within the halls of government and great commercial houses
gradually began to develop a very different perspective, whereby cash
exchange was normal and it was debt that came to be seen as tinged
with criminality.
Each perspective turned on a certain tacit theory of the nature of
society. For most English villagers, the real font and focus of social
and moral life was not so much the church as the local ale-house--and
community was embodied above all in the conviviality of popular festivals
like Christmas or May Day, with everything that such celebrations
entailed: the sharing of pleasures, the communion of the senses, all the
physical embodiment of what was called "good neighborhood." Society
was rooted above in the "love and amity" of friends and kin, and it
found expression in all those forms of everyday communism (helping
neighbors with chores, providing milk or cheese for old widows) that
were seen to flow from it. Markets were not seen as contradicting this
ethos of mutual aid. It was, much as it was for Tusi, an extension of
mutual aid-and for much the same reason: because it operated entirely
through trust and credit.50
England might not have produced a great theorist like Tusi, but
one can find the same assumptions echoed in most of the Scholastic
writers, as for instance in Jean Bodin's De Republica, widely circulated