Old Money

In this summer special of the popular Off the Record podcast, Beverly Chandler talks to Dr Daniel Wakelin, the Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Paleography at Oxford University about his research into medieval accountancy and the particular elegance of early business text.

Transcript

Beverly Chandler

Hello and welcome to our summer special Off the Record podcast, which brings you our Old Money recording. Pooled investments for infrastructure or short-term business deals sound ultra current, but in this outing of Off the Record we're going back in time, a long way back, to medieval texts that detail financial activities. Get on to your sun lounger, plug in your headphones and listen to me, Beverly Chandler, ETF Express and Institutional Asset Manager’s Managing Editor; and Doctor Daniel Wakelin, the Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Paleography at Oxford University, discuss his research into medieval business dealings.

Daniel Wakelin

Thank you for having me.

Beverly Chandler

We all know there is nothing new under the sun, but Professor Wakelin has uncovered the grace and elegance of early business text that would be refreshing to see revived today. Welcome and thank you Daniel for joining us. So you're a Professor of Medieval English Paleography. And can you explain what that is exactly?

Daniel Wakelin

Well, contrary to the expectations of my nephews, that's nothing to do with dinosaurs. It's the study of ancient writing. And in Oxford I teach medieval literature, and indeed all kinds of literature. But in particular, I teach our graduate students who come from all over the world to learn how to read the original medieval books and documents. So I teach them to read the strange handwriting and take apart the artefacts and understand how they were made and so on. I'm a kind of archaeologist of literature, if you like.

Beverly Chandler

And you've been studying early texts on money, and so can you tell me, just tell me more about that.

Daniel Wakelin

Well, I became interested in the the sort of writing that people were doing in the course of everyday life. Hitherto, I had mostly been teaching and researching literary works, and I thought, well, this is not the whole story - most of us write and read other things every day. And in the late Middle Ages, so the 1400s in particular, the century just up to when printing is introduced, the art of writing spread much more widely than it had hitherto, and perhaps as many as 40, 50% of people had some basic skill in this. And paper made it much more affordable. Paper was being imported from Italy and France and made much more affordable for people to write for themselves. So they take up the opportunity for their daily home life, and in particular for their business and government. And they began writing in English as they do so, so there are letters; there are things such as recipes and remedies; rules and ordinances for trades and businesses and local government. And among them I've been looking especially at account books and inventories of property, and they were often written together. You'd write an inventory of your stuff, and then you'd write the accounts of what comes in and out, financially and materially over the period. And they're completely absorbing, they've sort of taken over my imagination a little bit. Partly because we've got this sort of juicy glimpses of everyday life, exactly what people spent money on. So the little details of things. For instance, I think in the about 1450s, the grocers - the one of the Trade Guilds of the City of London who trade in foodstuffs - pay an enormous amount to blacksmiths and painters to make a weather vane of a griffin, a mythical beast, for their meeting house. And so it's fascinating to see them splashing out on this sort of a kind of brand management for their Guild in what seems like an entirely frivolous sort of expense in a way. But it's so important for them to put their visual mark on the city. So you get those kind of little details that are intriguing to capture.

Beverly Chandler

And do you find there are things in that approach to money that existed then that we might recognise or even learn from today?

Daniel Wakelin

Well, it's always of course hard to learn from history because they made a lot of mistakes that we wouldn't want to repeat. But there are lots of things that have struck me as more similar. I think if I said to you that I'm studying the Middle Ages, you'd think of, you know, peasants grubbing in the mud for basic subsistence. And it's true that a large part of the population did still live like that. But something had happened in, across Europe really, in the later Middle Ages, in 1348-49, perhaps 40, 50% of the population of Europe is killed in the Black Death. And as a result wages go up, so the people who survive do rather well out of it. And it creates a lot more economic mobility; people are able to leave the farm behind to barter for better wages in the towns, for instance. And in fact the greatest social historian of this period, Maryanne Kowaleski at Fordham University in New York, describes it as even the first consumer revolution because the people suddenly have a little bit more disposable income from working in trades rather than on the land. They're earning money rather than just bartering, exchanging. And so in the towns in particular they start to buy commodities and if you've ever seen those lovely Netherlandish paintings that are in the National Gallery that's just been renovated in London, those paintings of domestic scenes. Normally the Virgin Mary is in the foreground, but in the background you've got the pots and the pans and the rich fabrics, no sort of everyday objects. There's a lovely one in one of the galleries of John Dunn, who was an Anglo-Welsh minor gentryman, and he’s sat there praying to the Virgin with his wife. But mostly the picture’s taken up with the Turkish carpet, which would have been imported via Italian merchants; and with cloth with which the English were trading with the Flemish; and then the deluxe objects. And there's a mill in the background making money out of grinding the flour and so on, grinding the corn. So you've got this sort of materialistic world even then, so that's quite striking. And striking too, in its internationalism. Some of the most interesting accounts, for instance, are of the merchants who trade back and forth across the channel. The Italians, who moved to Southampton and London to do business for their Italian banks and introduce new Italian methods of bookkeeping, but also the English. Across the channel, there's a large English expat community in Bruges trading in cloth, so the wool is shipped from East Anglia and the Cotswolds to Bruges and they sell it on there. And also in Calais, which until the reign of Elizabeth the First is an English territory and has a large English speaking community. So you've got links back and forth. For instance, the Seeley brothers, who are a sort of early trade consortium from the Cotswolds, travel around the Cotswolds buying wool, shipping it to Calais and we've got their letters back and forth buying in goods from England and shipping cloth from Belgium back - or what's now Belgium back. And also we've got their account books, some of which record in intimate detail day by day, the ship’s voyages to Bordeaux to trade in wine for instance. And they're presented as you know, the book of the voyage, almost like a little traveller's tale if you like. But entirely for the purpose of recording the expenses of the ship as it goes back and forth, and which commodities are bought and sold. So it's a remarkable kind of international trade, promotes much of this writing.

Beverly Chandler

And all faithfully documented, which is really interesting. And I think you mentioned to me when we spoke before about the phrasing of these things, it's not, it's not even like the 1950s, “Yours of the 1st inst” letter writing that everyone would laugh about now; or the e-mail now, which we barely hardly say “Dear someone” in. I think you had a lovely phrase.

Daniel Wakelin

Well, that's what first drew me to it. Well, two elements. First, their skill in phrasing and second their skill in what you might call graphic design. The graphic design came first in fact. In 2017-18, I put on an exhibition of medieval graphic design called Designing English at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. And of course, I showed all of those gilded, illuminated books of hours, you know, the sort of gorgeous pages that you can probably picture. But I thought I've got to show something more ordinary. And so I put in an account book of somebody called William Uvedale, who was a landowner just outside Southampton, and I said there's a great skill in this in orderly bookkeeping as well. And, you know, the curator at the library said, “Well, it's not very visually interesting”. And I said, “No, it really is, look at this”. And I began to explore more of that. So they're very skilled in creating these pages. This is the period, the mid 1400s, about the 1430s or 40s, when they start separating items in accounts onto separate lines. They realise that this would be much easier to read and we still do that. They call them parcels, like little kind of gifts, if you like. And they talk about writing “particularly” - that's their word for it in English - and they start to divide those things up. Now that's graphically great because the numbers are in one column and the the description in the other, with little decorative lines to connect the two so you don't lose your place as you read down. So that's very skilled. They also indulge in the most weird calligraphy. So account keeping now is is so utilitarian, isn't it? You know, you use your spreadsheet or whatever other piece of software. Well then it's all of course done by hand individually and people cannot resist showing off their skill as writers, as scribes. So for instance the Pewter Makers Guild in London, who made little pewter badges for when you've been on a pilgrimage, or to show which Lord you owed your allegiance to; kind of like political badges if you like. They in their annual accounts each year, had a different scribe decorate the page in a different way, with the most fanciful designs. So the initial letter of the accounts would sometimes look like a gurning face or sometimes like a weird fish monster, and some of them in fact look a little bit like the pewter badges which survive from the period kept in the British Museum. So there's a sort of decorative skill in this writing, but then you read on and of course accounting means documenting what you spent the money on. And they write about it so brilliantly, they often write these little little stories. So, for instance, they'll begin, “Be it remembered” as though we're going to read it later, or well indeed, I am reading it later but they didn't know I was coming. But they'll say “Be it remembered that on this day, my lady and her mother went on to such and such a part of the country, and this was spent upon the voyage and wine at the Tavern on the way”. So they'll tell you what they've done in enormous detail, but even weird little things can be very telling. One of the earliest sets of accounts to appear in English is about 1432-3. It's by somebody called Alice Stoner, who is the wife of a wealthy landowner in Buckinghamshire. And the women are especially prominent in household accounts, not business ones so much, but households because their husbands would go away on business and the woman had to keep the show on the road at home. And so she has her servant do the writing because she wouldn't deign to be seen doing the writing, which is strictly manual labour. But she has him do it for her and she's dictating. And she describes all the fish they buy in Lent, because as good medieval Catholics they have to eat fish in Lent. And so there's a massive list of fish: rouget, thornback, smelt, whiting, salt fish, catfish, herring. I don't know what half of those fish are, I don't know whether you do, maybe you're a better cook than I am. But this servant has a wonderfully rich vocabulary for fish, there's something as simple as that, and I think there's a great intelligence and precision in that. It's not just “food” or “fish”, it's precision about exactly what was being bought and sold. And that really impresses me. I mean, one of the hardest things is to speak precisely right? And they managed to do it on even this sort of everyday basis.

Beverly Chandler

It's fabulous. It's so fabulous that you've got access to these documents. And I was going to ask you a bit more about that because you spent some time in Toronto and you can tell us what were you doing there and what was your title?

Daniel Wakelin

OK, so I went from research leave for a term and I was invited to spend it doing my research at an amazing institution called the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, set up by the Catholic Church in the 1930s to enable people to study the Middle Ages. And I should say I was the John Bennett Visiting Professor so should acknowledge the support of John Bennett, the donor to that. And there they have a wonderful library for people, primarily based in North America, where they've gathered together all of the relevant books on many subjects. And I had the sort of run of the library so I could rummage around and learn about these rather niche topics. I didn't know a lot about medieval fish beforehand, but in this library I could browse the shelves and find the right book. So that was immensely useful. But in fact the manuscripts themselves, the the original documents I've found mostly around the UK, some in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, but mostly around the UK. So I've spent some wonderful wintry days in, for instance, Southampton City archives or the archives of the City of London at the Guildhall or over in Clerkenwell. And at other record offices around the country, like Hertfordshire, Winchester, Exeter and so on, where these documents sit; some of them known about to local antiquaries, it should be said - they've often explored them in, even in the Victorian period - but many of them not so familiar because they're in slightly out of the way places. I'd want to give credit to the people who look after them actually. I was most struck in Southampton where on a, you know, a tight budget, the town librarian is having to also run classes for people seeking employment, to provide help to the confused or the homeless, and then having to hand me a pile of medieval documents in the corner of the library and juggling these things and caring for different kind of people and things so brilliantly. They do an amazing job.

Beverly Chandler

And it's important as we can hear, because actually it gives you a little straight view back, all those hundreds of years to how commerce was practised then. You were in New York?

Daniel Wakelin

Yes. So I was in New York, I was giving a talk at something called the Grolier Club, which is a club for bibliophiles in New York founded in the 1880s with a wonderful exhibition hall and Lecture hall on the Upper East Side. If you're ever in New York and have a spare hour I really recommend it, there's always something beautiful and interesting to see there. And I gave a talk, in fact, about medieval accounting and what these accounts are like. It was a great pleasure to sort of share that material over there. One person said to me afterwards, “Oh, I'd expected this to be extremely boring when I saw that it was about accountancy” and I don't like to say, but perhaps some of us share that expectation. She said, “But it was indeed engaging”, so I feel that was a job done. Because my main goal is to show people how rich and thought provoking these materials are with all kinds of lessons for our own, our own world, or at least parallels for our own world.

Beverly Chandler

And is there a new book on its way?

Daniel Wakelin

I think so, I’m in the throes of writing it. I think it's going to be called “Daily I wrote”, which is a phrase from a letter of one particular person, everyday creativity in English. And I do really see this accountancy and other practical writing as a kind of creative skill. We tend to see it as solely utilitarian, and it must do its job. But there's a skill and an art in doing that, I think, that these people master. We have to remember it's all done by hand. For instance, when they have the rough vouchers or receipts for particular payments, they then carefully transcribe that into one document, and then they produce the final calligraphic consolidated accounts at the end of the year, usually at Michaelmas or at Lady Day, the 25th of March. And there's a kind of process of care in keeping that going from copy to copy and in decorating it that I think, you know, our digital means of doing these things have slightly removed from us. There's still great care of course taken but it's not quite the same. It's not quite as artisanal or as hands on and it's important to remember that intellectual and professional satisfaction that people got from doing a good job, I think.

Beverly Chandler

Which is absolutely fundamental to good human experience. Thank you so much, you've been absolutely brilliant. Really enjoyed talking to you about this, and I just hope that all my listeners have enjoyed this too. This is one of our summer specials designed to bring you something slightly different from our normal round. Thank you to my guest today, Doctor Daniel Wakelin and thank you to you for listening. Remember to subscribe and leave a review and feel free to contact us at podcast@chandlerpublishing.com. This has been an Off the Record recording from Chandler Publishing. 

Outro

Off the Record is brought to you by Chandler Publishing. Production by Imogen Rostron, music by Otto Balfour, and hosted by me, Beverly Chandler. Thank you to our guests on this episode of Off the Record and to you for listening. We look forward to you joining us next time.