Why peasant goes into debt?. The meaning of medieval usury (Castile, XVth Century)

Abstract

This paper explores the characteristics of peasant indebtedness relationships in Castilian Later Middle Ages. Current historiography, based upon the so-called Commercialization and New Institutional Economics approaches, ignores the inequalities that the mercantile relationships reproduce and emphasizes the beneficial aspects of rural markets and credit. Using documents from Castilian concejos, specially the books of a public notary from Ávila, the paper analyzes rural loans and its relations with agrarian cycle and feudal extraction. After a quantitative test, we discuss in analytical and qualitative terms the specific form of pre-capitalist usurious capital