The English Statutes of Acton Burnell (1283) and Merchants (1285) established a national system of debt registration, which, although aimed primarily at assisting merchants in the recovery of their debts, was also used by creditors and debtors from other social groups. The statutes caused registries to be set up in leading English towns, which provided for the enrolment of ‘recognizances’ or acknowledgements of interpersonal debt. Use of this system was advantageous to creditors as it offered automatic recovery following a debtor's non-payment. The ‘recognizance rolls’, which recorded all debts registered under the system, now survive in small numbers, and for just a handful of registries. Much more numerous, however, and available for the whole country, are the statute merchant certificates of defaulted debt sent to the Chancery for enforcement by local sheriffs.

In Enterprise, money and credit, Pamela Nightingale uses 23,878 of these certificates of unpaid debt, now in National Archives class C 241, to reconstruct credit use in the volatile pre-plague decades. Although Nightingale's evidence mainly concerns the larger, more commercially orientated debts, her book has important things to say about the wider credit networks that together involved virtually all social strata. Nightingale has been working on the statute merchant certificates since the 1980s, and has explored them in print on previous occasions. That work, however, consisted of articles and chapters often focused on specific problems and regions, and on the certificates of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Thus a book-length analysis of the period before the Black Death, which covers the whole country, represents something novel, distinctive, and very welcome.

The medieval statute merchant system provides a great example of a contract enforcement institution ripe for analysis using the language and concepts of new institutional economics. Yet Nightingale eschews this kind of approach, giving only intermittent attention to the system's ability to solve the problems associated with pre-modern credit markets. Instead, her study is firmly focused on what the credit and debt relationships recorded in the certificates reveal about the chronological and regional development of the English economy. Chapter 1 offers a valuable introduction to central issues in the study of medieval money and credit, while in chapter 2 the author introduces the statute merchant certificates, and addresses critiques of her previous use of their contents. At the end of the book, chapter 12 draws out some key themes for the entire period. In between are nine chronological chapters, which focus on successive sub-periods. Each chapter gives substantial space to exploring the evidence on a county-by-county basis.

The result of these central chapters is a fascinating and detailed picture of the shifting fortunes of local urban and regional economies and their engagement in long-distance trade. These chapters represent an impressively nuanced account of complex patterns of commercial development that would be difficult if not impossible to reconstruct via other sources, though we must always keep in mind that the picture is based not on all credit extended, but only on debt that was registered using the statute merchant system and had been subject to default. At the study's heart is the all-important wool trade. The book presents important new information about the people involved, and its financing and organisation. Other important sectors such as lead and tin are also closely explored. A central theme concerns the steps by which denizen merchants, and especially those of London, slowly increased their grip on many aspects of English trade at the expense of aliens such as Italians. Yet the book also provides a vivid sense of the size and activities of the merchant populations in provincial towns, and of the many knights and parish clergy who also invested on a substantial scale. The distinctive character of local economies comes through strongly, a case in point being Norfolk where creditors and debtors were widely distributed in villages and small towns in a manner that reflects the importance there of rural industry. Discussion of some of the individual characters who figure most prominently in the certificates gives colour to what could otherwise be a dry story, examples being the moneylending Devon cleric Walter de Stapledon, later bishop of Exeter, or Isabel, widow of the Shrewsbury merchant John de Ludlow.

Nightingale is well known for a monetarist approach to the credit economy, which maintains that the amount of lending at all social levels was ultimately determined by the size of the currency and by the level of mint output, both of which could vary substantially. This view, which she has developed in previous work primarily with respect to the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is outlined again at the start of this book. In the period covered here, the 1330s and 1340s were characterised by a contraction in the size of the currency (especially its silver component), and by frequently low mint activity. Nightingale's model would thus predict a contraction of credit in these decades. What the certificates reveal, however, is that comparatively high levels of credit by value were extended at this time, with the high point for the entire period falling in 1340–1349. Nightingale looks at several different factors in her efforts to explore this conundrum, though it is never satisfactorily resolved. The introduction of a new gold coinage in the mid-1340s undoubtedly played a role, though this only really helps explain the surge in lending that took place right at the very end of the era under examination.

This book does betray signs of what appears to be rather hurried editing. In particular, the presentation of statistical evidence leaves something to be desired, since the contents of the tables and figures frequently do not match the related textual discussion. Such gripes aside, this study represents a valuable addition to the literature on medieval English credit, and a worthy addition to the Palgrave studies in the history of finance series.