Mortgages Raised by Rural English Copyhold Tenants 1605–1735

This chapter examines a sector of the seventeenth-century credit market in which a specific group in English rural society, who held real property by copyhold of inheritance tenure, used their land as security to raise mortgage loans. A number of authors from Tawney onwards have observed copyholder mortgages in passing, but there has been no previous detailed study of them. The chapter therefore examines how these mortgages were arranged and recorded; the details of who borrowed; how much, when and the terms of repayment; and their possible motives for doing so. Similarly, the activity and nature of the lenders are explored and the relationship, if any, between them and the borrowers. The picture which emerges is of a widespread and significant credit market amongst chiefly the middling sector of rural society. Copyholder mortgages represented a particularly attractive and secure way to borrow and lend during a century before formal financial institutions such as banks had been established and yet after the reform of the usury laws permitted interest to be charged. The latter provoked a flowering of mortgage activity after 1600, and the former meant that interpersonal lending was the usual method of effecting it.