has long been known that English Cistercian monasteries often sold their wool in advance to foreign merchants in the late thirteenth century. The abbey of Pipewell in Northamptonshire features in a number of such contracts with Cahorsin merchants. This paper looks again at these contracts in the...

While it is commonly believed that derivative instruments are a recent invention, we document the existence of forward contracts for the sale of wool in medieval England around 700 years ago. The contracts were generally entered into by English monasteries, who frequently sold their wool for up...

This paper argues that the relatively voluminous surviving records about foreign exchange (FX) rates in the Middle Ages can help to illuminate the much murkier question of medieval interest rates. We first explain how the medieval FX market operated and its links to the money market. Next, we...

This paper will show how the relatively voluminous surviving records about exchange rates in the middle ages can help to illuminate the much murkier question of medieval interest rates. We will first explain how the medieval FX market operated and its links to the money market. Next, we will set...

This paper employs a unique, hand-collected dataset of exchange rates for five major currencies (the lira of Barcelona, the pound sterling of England, the pond groot of Flanders, the florin of Florence and the livre tournois of France) to consider whether the law of one price and purchasing...

type="main" <p>This article looks at an important but neglected aspect of medieval sovereign debt, namely ‘accounts payable’ owed by the Crown to merchants and employees. It focuses on the unusually well-documented relationship between Henry III, King of England between 1216 and 1272, and...</p>

This impressive Handbook presents the quantitative techniques that are commonly employed in empirical finance research together with real-world, state-of-the-art research examples.

Research into medieval interest rates has been hampered by the diversity of terms and methods used by historians, creating serious misconceptions in the eporting of medieval interest rates, which have then been taken at face value by later scholars. This has had important repercussions on the...