Credit and investment between town and countryside: the market in grain annuities in Normandy (thirteenth-fourteenth centuries)

Abstract The replacement of rents in kind by payments in money is considered by many historians as a marker of the commercialization of the economy and thus of its modernization. The case of medieval Normandy does not confirm this development, however: the sources testify to a common use of money since the end of the eleventh century, but also to the persistence until the fifteenth century of payment in kind, including in the field of credit. The article examines the case of the Caen region, for which there is abundant evidence from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of annuities purchased with money from peasants in exchange for annual repayments in grain. This system allowed a significant transfer of monetary value to the countryside, while guaranteeing the supply of urban markets and welfare institutions. Although these contracts were usually secured by pledges on plots of land, they did not lead to the expropriation of peasants, but rather promoted the growth of credit markets in the countryside.