Measures of Success and Failure: Remembering Money in Medieval History Writing

At the beginning of February, Marcus Meer’s project ‘Money, History, and Moral Economies: Communicative Functions of Monetary Information in the Institutional Historiography of the Later Middle Ages (1250–1530)’ welcomed Gabriele Passabì to the team. Together, Dr Meer and Dr Passabì will look at why medieval chronicles abound in specific numeric references to sums of money (such as prices, taxes, debts, exchange rates) and broader discussions of monetary topics (about the debasement of currency, or problems with inflation or deflation, for example). Monetary rhetoric, the project argues, was a versatile communicative tool used in medieval chronicles to serve institutional strategies of remembering the past for the needs of the (medieval) present and to frame aspirations for the future. By investigating the monetary rhetoric of chronicles produced by and for cities, monasteries (both men’s and women’s), and courts in England, the Low Countries, and northern Germany between the thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the project will trace different manifestations of expanding monetary consciousness(es) and the economic thought and practice that accompanied them. In this post, they give a glimpse of their current work.

Marcus Meer: Chronicles of Convents and Lessons about Financial Success

Nuns in medieval Germany, like monks in male monasteries, had a long-standing interest in history—especially the history of their convents.¹ As early as the first half of the eleventh century, the unknown author of the annals of Quedlinburg Abbey demonstrated an acute awareness of the world and—of special significance for this project—money. But money in this chronicle mattered in a way that was perhaps to be expected of an institution whose ideal was to turn away from worldly concerns and focus on spiritual contemplation. Conscious of the ability of money to subvert what is morally right, the author of the Quedlinburg annals seemed to condemn anything that might create the impression of simony, that is, the sale of ecclesiastical offices for money.² About a century later, a chronicler of the Lippoldsberg Convent cautioned that ‘blessed is he in the age of ages who does not give his money to usury’,³ that is, lending at interest—another grave moral concern over the abuse of money.⁴

Paradoxically, of course, medieval convents were anything but removed from worldly affairs, including money. In fact, religious houses of women as well as men were significant economic players, and their economic importance only increased as the commercialization of medieval society gathered steam.⁵ Later medieval chronicles of women’s convents, then, are replete with references to money. In fact, ‘from rags to riches’ narratives were repeatedly woven into the histories of medieval convents. The achievement of overcoming initial want and acquiring abundance was accorded pride of place in several chronicles, not least because it was presented as a measure of divine benevolence. The chronicler of the Oetenbach Convent, writing in the middle of the fourteenth century, remembered the ‘great poverty’ suffered by the sisters for the first forty years of their existence after their foundation in 1234; they could only afford a wooden building, while their assets stood at ‘not even one gold mark’.⁶ Eventually, however, the arrival of a wealthy widow turned the convent’s fortunes around, and soon the nuns ‘increased in number and temporal goods’. Several other convents, too, presented the history of their houses as precarious but ultimately (divinely) destined to survive. This points to the formative functions of monetary rhetoric in medieval chronicles, serving to reassure the members of an institution of their continuity through past, present, and future.

While such financial blessings were believed by chroniclers in Oetenbach and elsewhere to have been enabled ‘through God’—such as when the Oetenbach nuns successfully persuaded the owners of lodgings in Zurich to part with their property in exchange for a rent of ‘money to the value of thirty pecks of grain’⁷—the chroniclers did not reject agency in matters of their houses’ economy. Rather, chroniclers’ talk about money conveys in no uncertain terms how a convent’s economic foundation could (and perhaps should) be secured without any of the disdain for financial matters shown by earlier chroniclers in Quedlinburg or Lippoldsberg. The Oetenbach chronicle instead praised the skills of three handmaidens whom the generous widow brought with her, because their skills in writing, painting, and illuminating began to generate much-needed income, which the chronicle rather specifically valued at ten marks annually.⁸ The chronicler added that ‘at this time a tradesman was paid eight pennies and a stablehand four pennies’, as if concerned with ensuring the supratemporal legibility of the monetary valuation of this move from poverty to prosperity by providing the reader with the necessary figures to conduct their own mathematical exercise in comparison and grasp the convent’s financial strength.

Gabriele Passabì: English Historiography and Monetary Accounts of Defeat

England, too, had been a region of prolific historiographical production since at least the early twelfth century, again especially in the context of monasteries (albeit mostly male ones).⁹ Here, like in Germany, these works offered chroniclers a space to interpret the past and shape the moral and political judgement of their audiences through a decidedly monetary lens. After all, England stood at the centre of the commercial expansion of the central Middle Ages. From the late twelfth century onwards, sustained economic growth, driven above all by the wool trade, integrated England into European markets.¹⁰ At the same time, the monarchy developed sophisticated systems of taxation and administration, making monetary awareness a key feature of governance.¹¹

A striking example of the production of chronicles at (and for) courts emerges in the Vita Edwardi Secundi. Composed around 1326, most likely by a clerk or someone close to the royal court, the Vita offers a bitterly critical account of Edward II’s troubled reign, providing acidic commentary on his reliance on favourites, corruption, and the disasters of the Scottish wars. Although the authorship of the Vita cannot be established with certainty, the work was clearly composed by someone with intimate knowledge of Edward II’s court and its political tensions. The most plausible profile is in fact that of a secular clerk operating within the royal milieu. John Walwayn (d. 1326) has long been proposed as the likeliest candidate. He was canon of Hereford and of St Paul’s, an agent of the earl of Hereford, and from 1314 a clerk at the royal court, where he was also briefly treasurer in 1328.¹² Despite the uncertainty around its author, the Vita is nonetheless very valuable to historians, as it maps out the opinions and reactions of a court insider regarding the volatile political landscape of the British Isles leading up to Edward’s deposition in 1327. What makes the Vita such remarkable evidence for our project is its fusion of traditional rhetorical registers with a monetary sensibility. The text is in fact pervaded by economic concerns, focusing especially on corruption, taxation, and warfare. The description of the Battle of Bannockburn (1314) illustrates this vividly. Bannockburn was one of the most devastating English defeats of the Scottish wars. As well as lamenting the loss of honour resulting from the defeat, the author of the Vita also stressed the financial damage from the booty taken by the Scots:

Oh! day of vengeance and misfortune, day of ruin and dishonour, evil and accursed day, not to be reckoned in our calendar, that stained the reputation of the English, and robbed the English and enriched the Scots, in which our men’s costly belongings, valued at two hundred thousand pounds, were snatched away! So many fine noblemen, [and] strong young men, so many noble horses, so much military equipment, costly garments, and gold plate—all lost in one harsh day, one fleeting hour.¹³

This lamentation, and the monetary information embedded within it, provides a commentary on a pivotal moment in the English wars against Scotland. Although English hostilities resumed soon afterwards, the Scottish victory at Bannockburn marked a decisive shift in the fortunes of both kingdoms and accelerated the chain of events eventually leading to the deposition of Edward II. Rather than asking whether the figures cited in this account are accurate, a more compelling question is what their presence tells us about contemporary expectations. Defeat here is not judged solely by the erosion of honour or reputation but by its measurable economic cost. Edward II is condemned as a poor general whose failures inflicted quantifiable financial damage on the realm. This rhetorical shift suggests that history and, specifically, Edward’s kingship, were not only judged by moral and military standards, but also by economic factors. The lesson of Bannockburn is not confined to the moralizing language of honour and military humiliation; rather, in the Vita it is also sharpened by the precise monetary losses that defeat entailed, reflecting broader cultural norms about competent kingship and responsible governance.

The Vita Edwardi Secundi thus demonstrates how, by the early fourteenth century, money had become more than a practical concern. It had entered the cultural codes through which kingship was assessed and had begun to shape historical precedents. By tracing how economic language structures narrative, we not only see a world in which legitimacy and social value were increasingly articulated in monetary terms, thus illuminating relevant shifts in the medieval moral economy, but we can also suspect, as in the case of the German-speaking nuns, that chronicles used this intertwining of money and history to communicate lessons in ‘good government’, even to kings.

Feature image: Coins depicted in the Schichtbuch, a fifteenth-century chronicle from Brunswick. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, MS 120, 121v.

1. See e.g. Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park, PA, 2004); Valerie R. Hotchkiss, ‘“An Overabundance of Grace”: Women’s Convent Chronicles in Fourteenth-Century Dominican Cloisters’, in William Caferro and Duncan G. Fisher (eds.), The Unbounded Community: Papers in Christian Ecumenism in Honor of Jaroslav Pelikan (New York, 1996), 113–26; Edeltraud Klueting, ‘Fromme Frauen als Chronistinnen und Historikerinnen’, in Edeltraud Klueting and Harm Klueting (eds), Fromme Frauen als gelehrte Frauen: Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kunst im weiblichen Religiosentum des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (Cologne, 2010), 217–30. [↩]
2. MGH SS rer. Germ. 72, 537, 571. On simony, see Giles E. M. Gasper, ‘Contemplating Money and Wealth in Monastic Writing c.1060–c.1160’, in Giles E. M. Gasper and Svein H. Gullbekk (eds.), Money and the Church in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200: Practice, Morality and Thought (Burlington, VT, 2015), 39–76. [↩]
3. MGH SS 20, 555. [↩]
4. Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 7. [↩]
5. Annalena Müller, Monastic Women and Secular Economy in Later Medieval Europe, ca. 1200 to 1500 (Abingdon, 2024). [↩]
6. Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, Cod. Cent. V, 10a, 120r (my translation, likewise for all subsequent quotations from this source). [↩]
7. Ibid. 123r. The conversion and translation of often highly localized medieval units of measurement is fraught with difficulties, but here the assumption is that both the German Mütt Kernen and the English ‘peck’ converge in their relationship to the Roman-Latin modius. [↩]
8. Ibid. [↩]
9. Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler (eds.), Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland 500–1500 (Cambridge, 2019); Antonia Gransden, Historiographical Writing in England c.550 to c.1307 (London, 1974), 136–65; Nancy F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago, 1977). [↩]
10. Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 1225–1360 (Oxford, 2001), 491–501; Adrian R. Bell, Chris Brooks, and Paul R. Dryburgh, The English Wool Market, c.1230–1327 (Cambridge, 2007); Richard H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1993); James L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150–1500 (London, 1980). [↩]
11. Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 55–80, 266–91; Richard W. Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988); Nigel Saul and Nicholas Vincent (eds.), English Medieval Government and Administration: Essays in Honour of J. R. Maddicott (Woodbridge, 2023). [↩]
12. Wendy R. Childs (ed.), Vita Edwardi Secundi, trans. N. Denholm-Young (Oxford, 2005). [↩]
13. Ibid. 96–7. [↩]

Marcus Meer

Research fellow in late medieval history at the German Historical Institute London.

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Gabriele Passabì

Gabriele Passabì is a historian of medieval Europe in the High Middle Ages (c.1000-1300) with special expertise on England and… Read more

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