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This volume investigates the use of mortgages in the European countryside between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. A mortgage allowed a loan to be secured with land or other property, and the practice has been linked to the transformation of the agrarian economy that paved the way for modern economic growth.

Historians have viewed the mortgage both positively and negatively: on the one hand, it provided borrowers with opportunities for investment in agriculture; but equally, it exposed them to the risk of losing their mortgaged property. The case studies presented in this volume reveal the variety of forms that the mortgage took, and show how an intricate balance was struck between the interests of the borrower looking for funds, and those of the lender looking for security. It is argued that the character of mortgage law, and the nature of rights in land in operation in any given the place and period, determined the degree to which mortgages were employed. Over time, developments in these factors allowed increasing numbers of peasants to use mortgages more freely, and with a decreasing risk of expropriation. This volume will be appealing to academics and researchers interested in financial history, rural credit and debt, and the economic history of agrarian communities.

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1 Introduction: mortgages and annuities in historical perspective Chris Briggs and Jaco Zuijderduijn 2 Mortgages and the English peasantry c.1250-c.1350 Chris Briggs 3 Mortgages raised by rural English copyhold tenants 1605-1735 Juliet Gayton 4 Mortgages and the Kentish yeoman in the seventeenth century Imogen Wedd 5 Why the equity of redemption? D.P. Waddilove 6 Credit and land: the Jews of Zaragoza 1383-1400 Michael Schraer 7 Not only land: mortgage credit in central-northern Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Giuseppe De Luca and Marcella Lorenzini 8 Rural credit markets in eighteenth-century France: contracts, guarantees and land Elise M. Dermineur 9 The use of perpetual annuities in rural Brabant in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Michael Limberger and Nicolas De Vijlder 10 Proactive peasants? The role of annuities in a late medieval communal society: the Campine area, Low Countries Eline Van Onacker 11 The other fundamental problem of exchange: mortgages, defaults, and debtor protection in sixteenth-century Holland Jaco Zuijderduijn 12 Afterword: mortgages as a mediation between kin and capital Craig Muldrew

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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).

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